Shiddy Shmiddy and the Great Email Caper

Days 1 and 2 of the new Trumpian order elicited finger-pointing, threats, grief and a whole lot of anger all across the liberal internet over Hillary Clinton's crushing defeat at the hands of a wrestling heel. Many asked some form of the same question: What detonated the IED on Clinton's road to history? Was it the Bernie Bros? Voter suppression? The DNC? Clinton's overconfident campaign?

Here's a theory: Michael Schmidt's highly questionable New York Times email stories bled the Clinton candidacy for more a year and a half, and left her wounded and vulnerable to the sexist and racist infection that ultimately killed her campaign.

Perhaps the sexism and racism needed no help from the Times; President-elect Donald Trump (yes, this really is a thing) inspired the worst in white America and encouraged not only racism and sexism, but anti-Semitism of the kind the country rarely sees in the open. That may have been all it took for rural and exurban whites to vote their most irrational fears and hatreds. We'll never know.

But we do know that the Times' initial, horribly flawed reporting coincided almost precisely with a critical election inflection point--the spring and summer of 2015, which saw Hillary's favorability rating dive below her unfavorables for the first time.

As this HuffPo graph shows, during her tenure as Secretary of State, Clinton was viewed positively by well over half the American people. The Benghazi hearings in the fall of 2013 began to drive her unfavorables up, but she managed to stay more positive than negative for months afterward.

Then Schmidt's first major email story, revealing Clinton's use of a private server, landed March 3, 2015, with her favorables barely outpacing her unfavorables. The lines cross over the next month, never to re-cross, and they diverge dramatically after the second major story on July 23, which claimed two inspectors general had made a criminal referral to the Justice Department. For the rest of the election cycle, she was among the "most unpopular candidates ever to run for the presidency," a phrase that became standard in reporting about the race.

It didn't matter that both Schmidt stories were wrong on the facts and in their emphasis, as Newsweek's Kurt Eichenwald pointed out at the time. The emails were an ongoing part of the so-called "Clinton trust narrative" now, chased constantly, if fruitlessly, as part of the media quest to balance out the barrage of negative Trump news, and used by GOP operatives to generate soundbites that in turn generated negative coverage of Clinton.

While Bernie Sanders avoided cynically piling on during the primaries, famously saying America was "sick and tired of hearing about (her) damn emails," the press wouldn't let go, goaded by Trump's "Crooked Hillary" exhortations.

FBI Director James Comey put a bow on the trend lines when he created 10 days of 11th-hour email stories beginning Oct. 28. Those FBI stories, like Schmidt's early reporting, turned out to be nothingburgers (or perhaps nothingweiners).

But the damage was done. Clinton's favorables never recovered. And America got President Trump.
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