Russian meddling did not taint the election

Let’s assume that Russia tried to swing the election to Donald Trump. Newspaper reports say that intelligence officials have reached that conclusion.

Did Russia’s efforts succeed? Trump backers, and even some conservatives who didn’t back him, are defensive about this point. But Trump’s margin in the electorally decisive states was sufficiently small that his victory can plausibly be attributed to anything that affected a significant number of voters.

It is certainly true, as many conservatives have noted, that Hillary Clinton could still have won the election if she had made different decisions, such as showing up in Wisconsin, refraining from setting up her own e-mail server, and so on. But it seems likely that if everything about the election had been the same except for Russian interference, Clinton’s lackluster campaign would have narrowly won those states.