COLUMBUS – A year and-a-half later, analysts and academics still have reached no real consensus on how Donald Trump actually pulled it off in the 2016 presidential election. But a trio of Ohio State researchers have a new — and controversial — study that shows a key portion of Trump voters were much more susceptible to fake news.
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Paul Beck, longtime OSU political science professor, said the post-election deep dive focused on voters who supported Barack Obama in 2012 but not Hillary Clinton in 2016. Only 77 percent of Obama voters stuck with Clinton, so if she had gotten only a handful more, she would be president.
“The real key in 2016 is what happened to the Obama voters?” Beck said.
He stressed the study did not prove a cause-and-effect directly linking fake news and Trump’s victory.
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“Whether it’s large enough to really make a difference, we can’t say,” he said. “But it’s very conceivable that it really affected the outcome of the election.”
Beck noted Clinton lost to Trump by a combined 77,744 votes in the closely contested states of Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin—a mere 0.6 percent of the votes cast.
“Even a modest impact of fake news might have been decisive,” concluded Beck and co-authors Richard Gunther and Erik C. Nisbet in what they say is the first examination of the impact of fake news on the 2016 vote.
“Indeed, given the very narrow margins of victory by Donald Trump in key battleground states, this impact may have been sufficient to deprive Hillary Clinton of a victory in the Electoral College.”
Researchers asked survey respondents 281 questions about the 2016 election, including their take on three fake news statements widely disseminated on social media and even via some broadcast outlets. Two were false negative statements about Clinton and one was a false positive statement involving Trump.
The former Obama voters who agreed with one or more of the fake news items were 4.5 times as likely to have defected from Clinton as those who agreed with none of the three false items.
Put another way, among those Obama voters who didn’t believe any of the three fake news stories, 89 percent cast ballots for Clinton. For those who believed one of the fake news items, 61 percent voted for Clinton. And of those who bought two or three of the false statements, 17 percent supported Clinton at the polls.
Beck emphasized that this conclusion does not support the condescending contention by some that Trump won because of uneducated white voters. While conducting the study, differences in education were taken into account — as were a host of other variables that could have explained the Obama voters’ defections instead of fake news.