Of the roughly 3,500 ads published this week, more than half — about 1,950 — made express references to race.Their findings exhibit to me evidence of a Russian desire to stoke discord among the populace of their primary power rival - the U.S. Russians are big racists, they particularly disdain people of African ancestry. They presume white Americans feel the same way, and older Russians remember Soviet propaganda which repeatedly said this was true.
At least 25% of the ads centered on issues involving crime and policing, often with a racial connotation. Separate ads, launched simultaneously, would stoke suspicion about how police treat black people in one ad, while another encouraged support for pro-police groups.
Divisive racial ad buys averaged about 44 per month from 2015 through the summer of 2016 before seeing a significant increase in the run-up to Election Day. Between September and November 2016, the number of race-related spots rose to 400.
Only about 100 of the ads overtly mentioned support for Donald Trump or opposition to Hillary Clinton.
In past presidential elections, roughly 90% of African-Americans have voted Democratic, and the Republican electorate is therefore mostly white. Russians, by stoking racial animosity, can have actually moved more people of both groups to vote, albeit for opposite sides. My guess is that was not their intent.
I believe their hope was to provoke riots and police crackdowns leading, in their best-case scenario, to insurrection. After getting their hopes up from Ferguson and Baltimore, basically they failed. However, from their viewpoint the effort may have been worth risking a few million dollars on.
