Putin spent practically nothing in key Battleground States in 2016 US pres. election: $54 in Wisconsin, $823 in Pennsylvania, and $300 in Michigan, per reports to Senate Intel Committee-Jan. 2018, Inst. for New Economic Thinking

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For Wisconsin, $1,979, with all but $54 dollars of this spent during the primary. Russian Facebook spending in the other two was even more minuscule: Pennsylvania absorbed $823 and Michigan $300 (Madrigal, 2017) (Ruffini, 2017).”

Jan. 2018, “Industrial Structure and Party Competition in an Age of Hunger Games: Donald Trump and the 2016 Presidential Election,” Institute for New Economic Thinking, Thomas Ferguson, Paul Jorgensen, and Jie Chen, Working Paper No. 66 

page 15: “Not surprisingly, the evidence revealed thus far does not support strong claims about the likely success of [alleged] Russian efforts.…The speculative character of many accounts even in the mainstream media is obvious. Several, such as widely circulated declaration by the Department of Homeland Security that 21 state election systems had been hacked during the election, have collapsed within days of being put forward when state electoral officials strongly disputed them (Greenwald, 2017), though some mainstream press accounts continue to repeat them. 29 Other tales about Macedonian troll factories churning out stories at the instigation of the Kremlin, are clearly exaggerated. When reporters from Wired and CNN showed up to check, the major inspiration turned out to be Adam Smith and the spirit of free enterprise: out of work locals had discovered that they could monetize clicks on advertising sites. More than a few had tried out several candidates before discovering that Trump ads generated more clicks than anyone else’s.3 

The paid ads Facebook has disclosed were hardly on the scale one would expect for an all-out effort ($100,000)….A more serious problem for strong claims is timing, since the buys were scattered through 2015, 2016 and 2017 and across states, and appear to have focused often on states that had no chance of ever tipping in favor of [Mrs.] Clinton. Subsequent revelations by Facebook underscore the importance of this issue, since more than half of its ads are admitted to have run after the election (Isaac and Shane, 2017). 

The Senate Intelligence Committee hearings produced truly microscopic numbers for putative Russian efforts directed at the key battleground states of Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, and Michigan: 

For Wisconsin, $1,979, with all but $54 dollars of this spent during the primary. Russian Facebook spending in the other two was even more minuscule: Pennsylvania absorbed $823 and Michigan $300 (Madrigal, 2017) (Ruffini, 2017). Unless Facebook discloses some vast new trove, the conclusion has to be that this was no full court press.”… 

page 1: “Abstract” 

“The U.S. presidential election of 2016 featured frontal challenges to the political establishments of both parties and perhaps the most shocking election upset in American history. This paper analyzes patterns of industrial structure and party competition in both the major party primaries and the general election. It attempts to identify the genuinely new, historically specific factors that led to the upheavals, especially the steady growth of a “dual economy” that locks more and more Americans out of the middle class and into a life of unsteady, low wage employment and, all too often, steep debts. The paper draws extensively on a newly assembled, more comprehensive database of political contributions to identify the specific political forces that coalesced around each candidate. It considers in detail how different investor blocs related to the Republican Party and the Trump campaign as the campaign progressed and the role small contributors played in the various campaigns, especially that of Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders. It also critically evaluates claims about the final weeks of the election in the light of important overlooked evidence.”
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References cited above, both page 92: 

“MADRIGAL,A. 2017. 15 Things We Learned From the Tech Giants at the Senate Hearings. The Atlantic, November 2, 2017.” 

“RUFFINI, P. 2017. Why Russia’s Facebook Campaign Wasn’t Such A Success. Washington Post, November 3, 2017.”


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