Two political scientists say that they have found no evidence that former FBI director James Comey cost Hillary Clinton the 2016 election.
Clinton has blamed Comey several times for her loss, citing a letter he released on October 28 announcing that the FBI was reopening an investigation into Clinton’s private email server.
“Absent that,” Clinton told NBC, “I believe the evidence shows I would have won.”
But Costas Panagopoulos and Aaron Weinschenk dispute that claim, arguing that analysis of polling data reveals there to be no evidence that the Comey letter “led to a decisive shift in voter support.”
“We arrive at this conclusion through an analysis of Clinton and Trump’s standings in national polls from July 1 through the day before the November election,” the pair writes in The Washington Post. “If the letter hurt Clinton, we should find a statistically significant decline in her lead over Trump, above and beyond what the other variables would tell us….But that’s not what we find.”
Instead, the political scientists found that while Clinton’s lead dropped slightly after the Comey letter was released, the decrease was not statistically significant.
“In other words, there is no clear evidence that the letter cost Clinton votes,” they assert.