What was the effect of Comey's final letter?

[60+ GOP Seats After 2018 GUARANTEED]

What evidence do you have that Access Hollywood was anything different from Trump's other scandals and blunders? It doesn't stand out as it didn't kill his campaign and whether it cost him 1% or 4% is pretty difficult to determine.

We're only saying this because he won.

Hell, Trump himself said that the tape was pretty much the end of his campaign.

The Access Hollywood tape caused many Republicans to abandon him and Reince thought he was over.

There are 3 reasons Trump was able to recover from the Access Hollywood tape:

1. He campaigned with discipline (for him) during the last few weeks.
2. His opponent was Hillary, who was married to an extreme pervert and her top aide was married to a wanna be child molester. If he was running against ANYONE else he would've been completely 100% done.
3. The Comey letter helped him get within the margin of error.

Nate Silver stated that as long as Trump loses the popular vote around 2%, he has a shot to win. The first Comey letter got him within 2 points in the national polls, and the second Comey letter came too late for her to really build off of it so she only got within 3-5 points ahead of Trump, well within the MOE.

And this may be a reason: too many women came out of nowhere and a lot of people thought it got too political, especially when Gloria Allred and porn stars got involved.

When you win, nothing bad affected you and everything you did was correct. When you lose, you should have done X and Y, while Z was the most devastating thing ever. It's like how literally during election night all the networks were bragging about Hillary's incredible ground game and data operation, but now it's Russia that somehow cracked the code and was able to do with $100,000 what Hillary and the Democrats couldn't do with $400 million+ plus the "best ground game and data operation ever."

[Stranger in a strange land]

The campaign followed a very predictable pattern:

1) Trump would say, do, or tweet something horrible and would crater in the polls
2) He would slowly recover as right-wing media rationalized his behavior and Republicans circled the wagons
3) Damaging information about Clinton (usually related to the emails, but sometimes also related to her health), would come out, causing Trump to pull even in the polls
4) Trump would say, do, or tweet something horrible and would crater in the polls

Trump only won because the election happened on stage 3. Had it happened one week earlier or one week later, he would have lost.

[TML]

I can't say for certain what might have happened without Comey's intervention. However, I do recall FiveThirtyEight publishing an article with five possible election outcomes:

1. A Hillary blowout, exceeding Obama's 2008 margin (413-119-6)
2. A Hillary win by approximately Obama's 2008 margin (359-173-6)
3. A Hillary win by approximately Obama's 2012 margin (322-216)
4. A Hillary win by a razor-thin margin (278-260)
5. A Trump win (244-294)

As we all know, #5 actually played out (although that article had Trump winning NH but not MI), but my best guess is that without Comey's intervention, the result would probably have been somewhere between #3 and #4 (predicted margin: 307-231).

[Fuzzy Bear]

The Comey letters didn't come out in a vacuum.  They came out in the midst of Wikileaks dumps and events such as Bill Clinton meeting with Loretta Lynch on the tarmac.  They came out in the midst of revelations that Debbie Wasserman Schultz fixed (as much as she could) the primary season, screwing over Bernie Sanders.  The revelations that Democratic operatives were the ones inciting mentally unstable folks to incite hostilities at Trump rallies. 

None of this was complimentary to Hillary Clinton.  She needed a boost of the sort where folks would see something genuinely positive about her; something that made her seem to be someone who wasn't a purely political animal, but a person who had actually done something noble that wasn't self-serving.  And she couldn't do THAT, and that is, when you think about it, amazing.  In a negative way.

She was the junior Senator from New York from 2001-2009.  This isn't a position too many chumps get.  Let's look at some of the men that have served as the Senator from New York:

Robert F. Wagner (D), author of the Wagner Act, and a champion of labor

Herbert Lehman (D), a champion of civil rights when it wasn't popular

Robert F. Kennedy (D) who challenged LBJ over the issue of the Vietnam war

Charles Goodell (R) who endured the wrath of the Nixon Administration in his principled opposition to  the expansion of the Vietnam War into all of Indochina

James L. Buckley (R) who was a principled conservative who sought to derail Ronald Reagan's 1976 Presidential bid because of his apostasy in naming Richard Schweiker as his candidate.

Jacob Javits (R), a giant of the Senate, and a bi-partisan leader on a broad range of issues.  Sen. Javits is probably the most productive Senator ever to serve in the minority for his entire career.

Daniel Patrick Moynihan (D), whose Senate career involved deep and productive involvement on a wide range of issues, including issues of national security, while serving on the Senate Intelligence Committee.

Charles Schumer (D), one of the most productive and influential Democratic Senators of our day.

There's only one slouch amongst the crowd.  Alphonse D'Amato (R), nicknamed "Senator Pothole", a Senator whose main focus was on tending to entirely local and parochial interests.

What did Hillary do with her Senate seat?  She used it to run for President.  Period.  She accomplished little; there are no Wagner Acts, no leading advocacies of any significant causes.  She was a headline grabber, and she kept herself in the spotlight, but she was a backbench Senator, without any real significant accomplishments, and who was (unlike all the others mentioned, even D'Amato) merely using the Senate seat for stardom and higher office.  It's tough to be an empty suit and an Senator from New York, but Hillary succeeded.  She wasn't even the parochial Senator D'Amato was. 

Hillary's whole career in her own right was about one thing:  Becoming the first female President.  At no time did she ever consider how important it was to actually perform well (as opposed to appearing to succeed) in the offices she held for its own sake.  People are not stupid; they figured this out for themselves, and an army of Mooks, Palmeiris, and Podestas couldn't undo that.

[Co-Chair Bagel23]

It cost Clinton the election, no doubt about it for me.

[Pericles]

To be fair to Clinton as a Senator, she operated in a time where partisanship has increased, Congress got less done and except for the time she was running for President Congress was controlled by the Republicans and for her whole tenure as a Senator there was a Republican President. Even so she was respected by Republicans and managed to work across the aisle, Trent Lott for one found her better than he expected, and she was deservedly re-elected in a landslide in 2006 with 67% of the vote, with a 12% swing towards her.

[Fuzzy Bear]

To be fair to Clinton as a Senator, she operated in a time where partisanship has increased, Congress got less done and except for the time she was running for President Congress was controlled by the Republicans and for her whole tenure as a Senator there was a Republican President. Even so she was respected by Republicans and managed to work across the aisle, Trent Lott for one found her better than he expected, and she was deservedly re-elected in a landslide in 2006 with 67% of the vote, with a 12% swing towards her.

She was not a terrible Senator, but she was markedly undistinguished.  Her Senate record was not the sort of record that would have made her the leading Democratic candidate in 2008; that would have been Joe Biden.  Her record as Secretary of State is, shall we say, "mixed", but it was nowhere near the level of accomplishment to where we'd point to her as someone heads and tails above the pack.  Her appointment as Secretary of State was a political payoff, a move to raise her profile and set her up for hard feelings.  How much more effective would Obama's foreign policy have been had he chosen a career diplomat, or someone with real gravitas in foreign affairs, rather than Hillary?

Hillary was "special".  People resent "special" folks who get places on something other than merit.  Why this surprises folks is beyond me.

[60+ GOP Seats After 2018 GUARANTEED]

To be fair to Clinton as a Senator, she operated in a time where partisanship has increased, Congress got less done and except for the time she was running for President Congress was controlled by the Republicans and for her whole tenure as a Senator there was a Republican President. Even so she was respected by Republicans and managed to work across the aisle, Trent Lott for one found her better than he expected, and she was deservedly re-elected in a landslide in 2006 with 67% of the vote, with a 12% swing towards her.

She was not a terrible Senator, but she was markedly undistinguished.  Her Senate record was not the sort of record that would have made her the leading Democratic candidate in 2008; that would have been Joe Biden.  Her record as Secretary of State is, shall we say, "mixed", but it was nowhere near the level of accomplishment to where we'd point to her as someone heads and tails above the pack.  Her appointment as Secretary of State was a political payoff, a move to raise her profile and set her up for hard feelings.  How much more effective would Obama's foreign policy have been had he chosen a career diplomat, or someone with real gravitas in foreign affairs, rather than Hillary?

Hillary was "special".  People resent "special" folks who get places on something other than merit.  Why this surprises folks is beyond me.

Everything she did was politically calculated. From marrying Bill to becoming Secretary of State.

She's never lived a day in New York, then a year before the 2000 Senate race she moves 40 miles north of NYC (she wouldn't be caught dead living NEAR the actual people of NYC). The crazy part? A woman who WAS working her way from the bottom to the top wanted to run for that Senate seat, but Clinton stole it from her like nothing.

She's never worked hard her entire life. She won a Senate seat a picture of poop could win against a Republican. She got Secretary of State as you said as a deal and to help her credentials for her Presidential run in 2016.

She's the complete opposite of a feminist to me. Literally married her way into power then took the easy route.

So glad she lost.

[Fuzzy Bear]

To be fair to Clinton as a Senator, she operated in a time where partisanship has increased, Congress got less done and except for the time she was running for President Congress was controlled by the Republicans and for her whole tenure as a Senator there was a Republican President. Even so she was respected by Republicans and managed to work across the aisle, Trent Lott for one found her better than he expected, and she was deservedly re-elected in a landslide in 2006 with 67% of the vote, with a 12% swing towards her.

She was not a terrible Senator, but she was markedly undistinguished.  Her Senate record was not the sort of record that would have made her the leading Democratic candidate in 2008; that would have been Joe Biden.  Her record as Secretary of State is, shall we say, "mixed", but it was nowhere near the level of accomplishment to where we'd point to her as someone heads and tails above the pack.  Her appointment as Secretary of State was a political payoff, a move to raise her profile and set her up for hard feelings.  How much more effective would Obama's foreign policy have been had he chosen a career diplomat, or someone with real gravitas in foreign affairs, rather than Hillary?

Hillary was "special".  People resent "special" folks who get places on something other than merit.  Why this surprises folks is beyond me.

Everything she did was politically calculated. From marrying Bill to becoming Secretary of State.

She's never lived a day in New York, then a year before the 2000 Senate race she moves 40 miles north of NYC (she wouldn't be caught dead living NEAR the actual people of NYC). The crazy part? A woman who WAS working her way from the bottom to the top wanted to run for that Senate seat, but Clinton stole it from her like nothing.

She's never worked hard her entire life. She won a Senate seat a picture of poop could win against a Republican. She got Secretary of State as you said as a deal and to help her credentials for her Presidential run in 2016.

She's the complete opposite of a feminist to me. Literally married her way into power then took the easy route.

So glad she lost.

She wasn't a slam-dunk to win that Senate seat.  She did get lucky in that Giuliani and Pataki both bowed out of the race.