The Russia-probe indictments announced Friday certainly sound quite ominous. The Russia-based Internet Research Agency “had a strategic goal to sow discord in the U.S. political system, including the 2016 U.S. presidential election.” Derogatory information was posted online against various candidates in an effort to support the Trump campaign. “Defendants made various expenditures to carry out those activities, including buying political advertisements on social media,” the indictment reads. “Defendants also staged political rallies inside the United States, and while posing as U.S. grassroots entities and U.S. persons, and without revealing their Russian identities and ORGANIZATION affiliation.”
The president’s antagonists are hailing the indictment as proof that the Russians meddled in the election; the president’s partisans are touting it for making clear there was no evidence that anyone in the Trump campaign knowingly colluded with the Internet Research Agency (the “organization” cited in the indictment). They point to the introduction of the indictment that states clearly that the trolls were “posing as U.S. persons and without revealing their Russian association, communicated with unwitting individuals associated with the Trump Campaign and with other political activists to seek to coordinate political activities.”
So, the battle over whether the indictment is a bombshell damaging to the president or a balm of vindication is well under way (including by Donald Trump himself, who has been tweeting away with all the taste and subtlety for which he is famous).
But let’s ask a different question: How effective was the Red Troll Army?
It’s notoriously difficult to demonstrate the effectiveness of online advertising. But the examples of the troll-produced social media ads given in the indictment are so clumsy that, unless Facebook and Twitter are even lamer than we’ve come to expect, it is doubtful the messages snowballed. Consider the ad the IRA bought April 6, 2016, targeting African-American voters. It read, “You know, a great number of black people support us saying that #HillaryClintonIsNotMyPresident.” Come October, the trolls had yet to learn the style or syntax of American politics, buying an ad with this preposterous left-footed text: “Hillary is a Satan, and her crimes and lies had proved just how evil she is.” They did not, however, at least so far as we know, take out an ad reading “You know, Moose and Squirrel are busy-bodies.”
But if the effectiveness of social media ads is a blurry business, another of the Russians’ activities—the organization of political rallies—is simple to evaluate. Did anyone show up?
Count 55 of Friday’s indictment adopts a Dragnet tone to detail the rally allegations: “In or around late July 2016, Defendants and their co-conspirators used the Facebook group ‘Being Patriotic,” the Twitter account @March_for_Trump, and other false U.S. personas to organize a series of coordinated rallies in Florida. The rallies were collectively referred to as ‘Florida Goes Trump’ and held on August 20, 2016.”
Let’s put these alleged “Florida Goes Trump” events in some context. In early August 2016, candidate Trump made a campaign swing through Florida holding a handful of his signature rowdy, jam-packed sports-arena rallies. As the Tampa Bay Times headlined its story in the middle of August, “In Florida, it’s Trump’s big rallies vs. Clinton’s massive organizing.” Hillary’s team was relying on mobilizing voters they had targeted as pro-Clinton. That, and they were spending lots of money: By August, Clinton and Democratic groups had bought some $22 million in Florida television advertisements. As the Tampa Bay Times pointed out—noting the anxiety of Republican party leaders that their candidate was falling behind—Team Trump had, by that time, made only $1.5 million in Florida media buys.
But the Trump people weren’t worried. “We’re running a unique campaign in the sense that we can draw 15,000 people together at a time,” a Trump Florida adviser, Karen Giorno, told the Times. “There are over 40,000 people that we’ve touched in the last two weeks with just four events.” And by that she meant official events such as the August 10 rally at the BB&T Center in Broward County, and the one the next day in Kissimmee, near Orlando. “We have a movement,” Giorno said. “Hillary Clinton is struggling to get people moving in her direction.
It’s easy to document that these actual Trump rallies happened. Thousands of real people took thousands of photos and posted them online. The events were covered extensively in newspapers up and down Florida and in the national news. But what about the rallies allegedly organized by the Trump-promoting, faux-American trolls? You’d be hard-pressed to find evidence in Florida newspapers that anything Trump-related happened anywhere in the state on August 20, 2016.
Which isn’t to say the coordinated “Florida Goes Trump” rallies didn’t happen. The Associated Press found and talked with an actual Floridian tricked by the Russians into putting on an August 20, 2016, rally in Clearwater, “real estate development consultant” Jim Frishe. He “was called by someone identifying themselves as with a group called ‘Florida for Trump’ and asked to organize a sign-waving rally,” the AP reports. So how did the Clearwater event go? Frishe “said between 15 and 18 people showed up and that he didn’t receive any signs or money or other support. He never heard from them again.” That fits with video taken of another streetcorner rally that day, one in Coral Springs, where 10 or so people waved Trump signs.
Reporting on the troll conspiracy back in September, Vanity Fair had this breathless headline: “Foreign Agents May Have Orchestrated 17 Pro-Trump Rallies in Florida.” And yet it was the subheadline that said it all: “Facebook data suggests dozens of people attended events planned by Russia.” Dozens.
A real Trump rally regularly attracted 15,000 Floridians; a fake, Russian-organized Trump rally attracted 15. If the rest of their efforts were similarly impotent, the Red Troll Army starts to look not so much ominous but humorous: It’s hard to credit that particular Russki-funded endeavor with having any impact at all, let alone swinging an election.
