Changing the Kremlin’s Election Interference Calculus

Abstract

Since the Russian government’s interference in the 2016 US presidential election, much has changed: dozens of public and private studies have detailed Russia’s playbook of operations; the intelligence community has become more transparent in publicly reporting on the issue; the US has imposed sanctions on dozens of Russian actors involved in the disinformation ecosystem; and technology platforms have spent millions of dollars on misinformation task forces and content guidelines. Yet one thing remains markedly unchanged: election interference is still an incredibly low-cost, high-gain mechanism of influence for the Russian government. The Kremlin has strong incentives to interfere in US elections again. And with Vladimir Putin’s illegal, aggressive, and large-scale war on Ukraine, it is clear that the Putin regime will continue to target other countries it sees as its enemies with wide-ranging means of attack, influence, sabotage, and subversion. Russian state and state-backed interference in 2016 took many forms, including hacking and leaking campaign documents, building relationships with Trump campaign officials, and spreading disinformation and stoking division on US social media platforms. It is an open empirical question whether those social media posts actually swayed Americans’ voting decisions, and if so, how. The same question could be asked about the media coverage of the leaked Clinton campaign documents, though resulting press coverage was highly critical of Hillary Clinton. Yet assessing modern Russian and even Soviet disinformation purely on this definition of effectiveness misses the