Cyberwar: How Russian Hackers and Trolls Helped Elect a President—What We Don’t, Can’t, and Do Know

Most recent American presidential elections have had reasonably close outcomes, and twice in the last five we have elected a president through the Electoral College who won only a minority of the popular vote. The 2016 campaign produced one of those results, where Hillary Clinton received almost three million more votes than Donald Trump, but he successfully negotiated the Electoral College with a 77-vote margin. If you are looking for the definitive explanation of whether and how the Russians helped Donald Trump defeat Hillary Clinton in the 2016 presidential election, you won’t find it here. That is because there is no single reason why Trump won and Clinton lost, and there is no “smoking gun” piece of evidence demonstrating how a Russian plan was designed, implemented, and succeeded. But if you are looking for a well-organized, theoretically grounded, and compelling description of how Russia interfered in the 2016 presidential election and how it might have helped Trump, this is it. Using her full repertoire of rhetorical skills and a careful sifting of the available evidence and its likely impact, Jamieson finds enough evidence to convince the reader that Russian computer specialists—along with the crucial assistance of WikiLeaks at decisive points in the campaign—played a decisive role in electing Donald Trump the 45th president of the United States. This explanation and presentation is much more compelling than the enumeration of Russian efforts to influence American politics since 2015 contained in the two recently released reports prepared for the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence.1 Perhaps more importantly, Jamieson elucidates problematical elements of the American media and electoral systems that could provide continuing cover for foreign elements who want to influence—if not damage—important American democratic institutions by sowing discord among various population subgroups.