The report prepared for the Senate shows that Russia’s social media effort was enormous, with millions of posts spread across dozens of accounts. Accounts that both Google and Facebook were willing to accept as generated by real Americans even though they were all coming from the same place and many were paid in rubles. Because, sure. Americans do that.
That report also shows that the largest part of the Russian social media effort was specifically centered on racism. And it wasn’t all on appealing to racist voters on the right. The largest single effort was in suppressing the votes of African American voters by spreading a message that the Democratic Party, and Hillary Clinton in particular, did not respect their issues or pay attention to their communities.
Those efforts mirrored the more familiar efforts on the conservative side of the line. Russia created fake social media stories of Clinton’s disrespect for black voters, ran ads on black radio stations, even arranged actual boots-on-the-ground protests that were scheduled and promoted straight from St. Petersburg. They also used the tools provided by social media corporations to target voters in specific districts with their “walk away” message.
Russia has long understood that racism is a major weakness in America that can be exploited on almost any issue. But there’s another reason that Russia put depressing the votes of black voters at the top of their to-do list. A reason why they knew they could be particularly effective in this effort, and perhaps even more effective than in spreading fear and hatred on the right.
That reason’s name is Aaron Nevins. In the broader discussion of conspiracy between the Trump campaign and Russia, Nevins gets little attention. Some of that is because Nevins wasn’t an official member of the Trump campaign. He was a Republican strategist working in Florida. But when it comes to conspiring with the Russians, there’s no doubt about this: Nevins conspired to aid a foreign power in altering the outcome of an election in the United States. That’s a fact. Nevins has even admitted as much. And there’s one specific thing that Nevins did which related directly to Russian social media efforts.
More impressed after studying the voter-turnout models, Mr. Nevins told [the Russians], “Basically if this was a war, this is the map to where all the troops are deployed.”
Aaron Nevins contacted “Guccifer 2.0” asked for, and received, a dump of the documents that the Russians stole from the DNC and other sources. Scanning through these documents, Nevins found the Democratic voter-turnout models and get out the vote plans. In communications, the GOP strategist realized that the Russians did not know the value of this document.
So he told them. Aaron Nevins explained to Russia how the document reflected where Democrats expected to find the votes on Election Day. It was the inside track information where to find Democratic voters and where the party intended to devote its time and efforts to bring those voters to the polls. It was also a perfect road map for Russian efforts to depress Democratic votes.
There was all sorts of information, including analyses of data about places and kinds of people that Democrats figured were their biggest sources of voters who could be persuaded to vote their way. And there was also research that revealed what the Democrats saw as vulnerabilities of their own candidates.
Nevins presented Russia with both the messages that could be most effective and the places where it would work to hurt the Democratic effort. And he didn’t care that it was Russia on the other end of his conspiracy. Because “their interests aligned” in defeating Hillary Clinton.
Nevins didn’t just provide these documents to the Russians. Once he had located the Democratic models, he provided this information, in secret, to a still unknown number of Republican candidates—especially in Florida. That information was likely used in Republican planning not just in 2016, but also in their fingernail-thin wins in 2018.
How effective was this effort? According to Pew, black voter turnout declined in 2016 for the first time in 20 years. The record seven point drop from 2012 to 2016 didn’t just bring turnout to a lower number than either of Barack Obama’s elections, it was lower than since the 1990s.
The Russian effort to turn out Republican votes in critical areas, especially in the upper Midwest, has been heavily covered. However, Russia put considerably more resources into seeing that black voters stayed home in 2016. That may have actually been the more important, more decisive effort.
With a big assist from Republican strategist Aaron Nevins.
