Updated | I am Sidney Blumenthal. At least, that is what Vladimir Putin—and, somehow, Donald Trump—seem to believe. And that should raise concerns not only about Moscow’s attempts to manipulate this election, but also how Trump came to push Russian disinformation to American voters.

An email from Blumenthal—a confidant of Hillary Clinton and a man, second only to George Soros at the center of conservative conspiracy theories—turned up in the recent document dump by Wikileaks. At a time when American intelligence believes Russian hackers are trying to interfere with the presidential election, records have been fed recently to Wikileaks out of multiple organizations of the Democratic Party, raising concerns that the self-proclaimed whistleblowers group has become a tool of Putin’s government.

But now that I have been brought into the whole mess—and transformed into Blumenthal—there is even more proof that this act of cyberwar is not only being orchestrated by the Russians, but that they are really, really dumb

The evidence emerged thanks to the incompetence of Sputnik, the Russian online news and radio service established by the government controlled news agency, Rossiya Segodnya.

The documents that Wikileaks unloaded recently have been emails out of the account of John Podesta, the chairman of Clinton’s election campaign. Almost as soon as the pilfered documents emerged, Sputnik was all over them and rapidly found (or probably already knew about before the Wikileaks dump) a purportedly incriminating email from Blumenthal.

The email was amazing—it linked Boogie Man Blumenthal, Podesta and the topic of conservative political fevered dreams, Benghazi. This, it seemed, was the smoking gun finally proving Clinton bore total responsibility for the terrorist attack on the American outpost in Libya in 2012. Sputnik even declared that the email might be the “October surprise” that could undermine Clinton’s campaign

To understand the full importance of the story—and how much Putin and his Kremlin cronies must have been dancing with delight—I have to quote the top few paragraphs:

In a major revelation from the second batch of WikiLeaks emails from Clinton Campaign Chairman John Podesta it was learned that Hillary's top confidante Sidney Blumenthal believed that the investigation into Benghazi was legitimate because it was "preventable" and the result of State Department negligence.

In an email titled "The Truth" from Hillary's top confidante Sidney Blumenthal, the adviser writing to undisclosed recipients said that "one important point that has been universally acknowledged by nine previous reports about Benghazi: The attack was almost certainly preventable" in what may turn out to be the big October surprise from the WikiLeaks released of emails hacked from the account of Clinton Campaign Chair John Podesta.

Then came the money quote: "Clinton was in charge of the State Department, and it failed to protect U.S. personnel at an American consulate in Libya. If the GOP wants to raise that as a talking point against her, it is legitimate," said Blumenthal, putting to rest the Democratic Party talking point that the investigation into Clinton's management of the State Department at the time of the attack was nothing more than a partisan witch hunt.

Those words sounded really, really familiar. Really familiar. Like, so familiar they struck me as something I wrote. Because they were something I wrote

The Russians were quoting two sentences from a 10,000 word piece I wrote for Newsweek, which Blumenthal had emailed to Podesta. There was no mistaking that Blumenthal was citing Newsweek—the magazine’s name and citations for photographs appeared throughout the attached article. The Russians had carefully selected the “of course” paragraph, which mentions there were legitimate points of criticism regarding Clinton and Benghazi, all of which had been acknowledged in nine reports about the terror attack and by the former Secretary of State herself.

This false story was only reported by the Russian controlled agency (a reference appeared in a Turkish publication, but it was nothing but a link to the Sputnik article). So how did Donald Trump end up advancing the same falsehood put out by Putin’s mouthpiece?




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Yesterday, Hillary Clinton’s win probability hit 95%. This seems like a good time to reveal one of the Princeton Election Consortium’s secrets. Thankfully, it does not involve an Access Hollywood video.

Here it is: poll-based Presidential prediction is not very hard.

I guess that is a pretty boring secret. Sorry.

It is an interesting irony that poll aggregation got popular in 2008, a year when there was not that much suspense in the Presidential race. That year, Barack Obama led John McCain for almost the entire campaign season, with the possible exception of the week after the Republican Convention, where Sarah Palin stole the show. That ended up with a 7-percentage-point popular win, and an electoral outcome of 365-173.

President Obama’s re-election in 2012 carried even less suspense: he never lost the lead to Romney. The closest he came was right after the first debate, though even then he was slightly ahead. The eventual outcome was a 4-percentage-point popular win and an electoral outcome of 332-206.

I have formed a sneaking suspicion that the runaway success of poll-based forecasting arises from these two victories. If this is correct, then sites like The Upshot and FiveThirtyEight are basically prurient entertainment for progressives. Which is okay with me. Everyone needs an outlet. Republicans got theirs in 2010 and 2014.

I think it is a good thing that those sites did not start in 2004. When many hobbyists (including electoral-vote.com, me, and many others) started doing poll aggregation, it was a tough year: John Kerry and President George W. Bush traded the lead several times, and it was a photo finish, coming down to Ohio. When it comes to probability, it is too easy to do a suboptimal job of extracting all the possible value out of polls. That would have led to a boring year of commentary: “it’s too close to call!” seems okay for a pundit to say, but is that what we really want from a data nerd?

This year, Hillary Clinton’s lead has been remarkably consistent, despite the emotional drama offered by commentators. At some level the drama is justified by the expected value, which is defined as the size of a payoff (or cost) multiplied by its probability. This year, the cost of a presidency as profoundly disruptive as Trump’s would be enormous. Even 5% of that would be notable.