I agreed with the rest of your post, I even agree with most of what's here, especially since you qualified it later.
It's just it becomes (for many, not you) a tired talking point: "Russia influenced the election and helped Trump win."
OK, how did they do this?
"Social media, yadda yadda."
The problem I have with this is NOT that Russia didn't, say, send out phony stories about Hillary but rather the idea that there were even hundreds, much less thousands much less MILLIONS of people who were on (say) Facebook and said:
"I'm for Hillary" and then saw something on Facebook from Russia and said, "Wow, she's a bad person, I'm gonna vote for Trump!" Or the alternative, her voters were for her, heard something bad about her and then decided to stay home. It only matters if those voters were in Wisconsin, Michigan, and Pennsylvania. It literally matters not a whit if she lost one million votes in California because of that operation.
What's funny is that before she was nominated, the justification was, "Her negatives are well-known, people already know whether they like or don't like her." But after she lost, it all became, "Well, she had it won but then James Comey, then the Russians, then" and every excuse imaginable that never addresses why she never set foot in Wisconsin in the fall campaign.
I only cringe when I read this (again, I'm piggybacking on your post, I know you didn't say this) because it's become the backdoor way partisan Democrats try to pretend "Trump stole the election" in 2016. And btw - lest anyone think I'm exaggerating - here are Democrats saying that very thing:
“I think a full investigation would show that Trump didn’t actually win the election in 2016
. He lost the election, and he was put into office because the Russians interfered on his behalf."
- former
President Jimmy Carter
"You can run the best campaign, you can even become the nominee, and
you can have the election stolen from you."
- former
First Lady Hillary Clinton
"I don't see this president-elect as a legitimate president...I think the Russians participated in helping this man get elected. And they helped destroy the candidacy of Hillary Clinton."
- House Rep. and
civil rights icon John Lewis
And btw - Allen and Parmes reported in their book "Shattered", on page 400:
In other calls with advisers and political surrogates in the days after the election, Hillary declined to take responsibility for her own loss. “She’s not being particularly self-reflective,” said one longtime ally who was on calls with her shortly after the election. Instead, Hillary kept pointing her finger at Comey and Russia. “She wants to make sure all these narratives get spun the right way,” this person said.
That strategy had been set within twenty-four hours of her concession speech. Mook and Podesta assembled her communications team at the Brooklyn headquarters to engineer the case that
the election wasn’t entirely on the up-and-up. For a couple of hours, with Shake Shack containers littering the room, they went over the script they would pitch to the press and the public. Already, Russian hacking was the centerpiece of the argument.
"We lost because of the Russians" is just another in the long line of excuses of why they never REALLY lose elections, someone steals it from them.
Voting is nowhere near the cognitive and intellectual act pretended by "well, she was gonna win but Comey, but Russia." That narrative only works if you CHANGE VOTES. It has no effect on votes already decided. (What's funny is BEFORE the election, Democrats were bragging about all those early votes they'd supposedly won - NONE of those early votes could have been affected by stuff that happened after the voting).
www.theguardian.com
