The Mueller team’s indictment earlier this week of a dozen Russian GRU agents confirms something I wrote on the subject back in March 2017.  Loyal readers hardly need me to remind them, but if you scroll back to an article headed “Thoughts on the Opposition to Donald Trump” that I posted in March of last year, you will see the point laid out in detail in the second half of the article.

Maybe too much detail.  Let me summarize:

The winning formula for a Democratic presidential nominee is: 1988 + 1992 + Florida > 270.

Until 2016, a Democratic candidate began with the states that every Democrat has won since 1988 (9 states; 90 electoral votes) and the states that every Democrat has won since 1992 (10 states, 152 electoral votes).

Source: https://www.nationalreview.com/2014/11/breaking-blue-barrier-myra-adams]

That gets you to 242 electoral votes.  Add Florida’s 29 electoral votes or the equivalent from other states and you’re parking the family car at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue.

The 1988 + 1992 part of the formula is the “Blue Wall”.  Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Wisconsin were part of the Blue Wall.  They went for Trump by narrow margins.  Secretary Clinton ran up enormous majorities in California and New York, two of the sturdiest bricks in the Blue Wall.  The votes in those states in excess of 50.0001% didn’t help her.  She needed some of those extra votes in the key states that she lost.

The politicians who told us in October 2016 that our democracy will corrode beyond repair if the loser in a presidential election complains about electoral foul play have changed their minds.  After the fact, the astounding outcome in 2016 had to be due to subterfuge and trickery, combined with collusion and foreign interference.

The interference – the meddling – had to be coming from the Russians.  How might the Russians have meddled?  I looked at two possibilities.

First, they might have tinkered with the mechanics of voting.  It’s possible that they tried and will keep trying.  But, as President Obama pointed out when he and everyone else thought Donald Trump had no chance, our voting system is dispersed.  If a foreign outfit somehow gained access to a voting machine or a ballot box here or there, only a few votes could be swung at each location.  The margins of victory in the three rogue states were small in percentage terms, but still amounted to tens of thousands of votes.  Intrusions into the system on the scale necessary to affect the outcome would have been noticed, particularly with the DOJ, the FBI, 95% of the country’s news media, and half of its federal politicians looking for it.

So, if Russian interference made the difference, it was because of the theft and publication of emails from servers of various Democratic party and campaign operations.

Was it the publication of those emails that swung Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Wisconsin to Donald Trump?  Blue collar voters in those states went for Trump.  Their votes usually go to the Democratic candidate, but they will sometimes make an exception.  They voted for Ronald Reagan.  These are voters who like tariffs on foreign goods that undersell the products of their employers.  Trump talked about the lousy trade deals that the country had signed.  He was going to repair the damage.  The wage earners of those three states liked that message and voted for the man who delivered it.  I don’t think they cared about the Democratic Party’s emails.

At the same time, African-American voters gave Hillary Clinton significantly less support than they gave to Barack Obama.  In 2012, President Obama received 960 out of every 1,000 votes cast by African-Americans.  In 2016, 10% of those voters stayed home.  Of the 900 per 1,000 who voted, 72 (8%) voted for Donald Trump.  Where Mr. Obama in 2012 got 960 votes per 1,000 African-American voters, Mrs. Clinton got 822 (counting the 100 who stayed home).  The gap adds up as those thousands are multiplied hundreds of times.  It wasn’t noticed in a place like California, where the size of her victory masked the softness of her support from critical segments of the voting population. It was decisive in the three states that fell out of the Blue Wall.  Was that nearly 14% swing (138 votes per 1,000) against Mrs. Clinton due to voter disgust with the content of stolen emails?  I doubt it.

Pocketbook issues and personal style were more important to most voters than the content of stolen emails.  Also, some voters like to be schmoozed.  If you’re undecided, you might give your vote to the person who asks for it.  Mrs. Clinton took too many votes for granted.  Donald Trump campaigned hard in those upper Midwest blue states.  Enough voters liked his rambling style and his announced plans – the wall, tariffs, lower taxes, reduced regulation, no cuts to Social Security or Medicare, end Obamacare, leave the Paris climate deal, end the Iran deal, renegotiate NAFTA, reject TPP, etc. — to enable him to eke out wins by small margins in critical states that Mrs. Clinton took for granted.  Even so, he had to win the states that any Republican needs — Florida, Ohio, North Carolina, Arizona, and the like – in order to balance the parts of the Blue Wall that survived 2016.

This is the second set of indictments against Russian operatives.  The dozen this week were preceded by a baker’s dozen a few months ago.  Did you know that one of the baker’s dozen made a court appearance back in April?  Three of the thirteen that Mueller indicted were entities, not individuals.  One of the entities hired a DC law firm and made a court appearance.  They made discovery requests and asked for a speedy trial.  The Mueller prosecutors didn’t want to proceed.  They argued that the defendant had not been properly served with process.  That may be the first time a prosecutor anywhere in the world has made that argument about a criminal defendant who has voluntarily appeared in court.

Call me a cynic, but the prosecutor’s behavior told me that the 13 indictments were done for show rather than for use.  Could it be that last week’s 12 were done for the same purpose?  I would be happy to be proven wrong.  If the Mueller team seeks extradition of the defendants from Russia or asks Interpol to arrest the GRU agents any time one of them steps outside of Russia, that would suggest that these indictments were made for a serious purpose.

Once these individuals are in a US courtroom, they can test the evidence against them and can be forced to pay the price for what they did if the evidence is sufficient.  But whatever these Russian operatives did, the voters in 2016 made up their own minds and cast their votes freely.  The traditionally Democratic voters who turned away from Mrs. Clinton made a judgment about her character and competence and either diluted their support or gave it outright to her opponent despite his flaws.  There are reports that she is considering a run in 2020.  If the voters decide they made a mistake in 2016, they will have the chance to correct it.  The voters will speak in their own voice.  Purloined emails won’t matter then any more than they did two years ago.