2016 Postmortem

area of expertise. You are right that ANYONE saying how it affected people is guessing. Think of any close election in the past -- and you will find that many things could possibly have made the difference. Here, we KNOW that the DNC leaks and the Podesta email created stories that ranged from not positive to embarrassing.

It is extremely difficult to estimate the impact of any event on the results of the election. However, you can look at when poll numbers changed. The leak of the DNC stuff was clearly timed to turn the convention into a hot mess -- but that did not happen and the CW at the end of the convention was the party was unified. (It was contrasted to Ted Cruz calling out the nominee and not saying he would vote for him) That leak - at that time - seemed not to have had a huge impact, but could it have angered enough of the Reagan Democrats or Bernie supports in the three critical states to not vote or vote Trump? I know of no study done there to answer that.

The Podesta emails, seemed pretty boring and not particularly scandalous, but they came out in drips and drabs - I think Trump used the leak of the GS speeches - to both bring that up again and to highlight comments on TPP. With both this and the DNC stuff - as Obama suggested, implying indirectly that it wasn't helpful- you can't say for sure it hurt, but it did keep the campaign off message.

On the other hand, from polling data, the BIG drop was in the next few days after the first Comey letter. This was seen looking at all the national polls taken. It is highly likely that raising that issue again (and bringing up Weiner) can almost certainly be said to have had a big enough affect that it changed the election from an easy win to a loss.

The fact that we can't prove from any of the polls etc that this caused the loss -- this is a very bad, unacceptable infringement of our democracy.