Matthew Yglesias: “While it’s true that fake news appears to have circulated widely in Trump-friendly corners of the internet — possibly with some assistance from the Russian government — the idea that fake news was central to the outcome of the campaign has little basis in fact. The very nature of viral fake news is that it’s mostly likely to be shared by people who are already bought into a partisan or ideological worldview, with pro-Trump fake news largely shared by Trump supporters to other Trump supporters.”

“Clinton’s campaign did have a fake news problem, but the problem was with the real news coverage — coverage that dwelled overwhelmingly on a bullshit email server scandal, devoted far fewer resources to investigating Trump’s shady foundation than Clinton’s life-saving one, largely ignored Trump’s financial conflicts of interest, and almost entirely avoided discussion of the policy stakes in the campaign.”

Jacob Levy: “An 80,000 vote margin in a 137 million vote election, about .05%, is susceptible of almost endless plausible explanations. The number of different factors that might well have moved that many votes is very large. So there are a lot of different true but-for explanations: but for Clinton’s failure to campaign in Wisconsin, but for the Comey letter, but for stricter voter ID laws and reductions in the numbers of polling places, but for Jill Stein, and so on, ad infinitum. A Democratic party strategist has good reason to take lots of them very seriously.”

“But anyone trying to generalize about popular beliefs or the electorate’s mood should be very wary of any of them. Grabbing a plausibly-true but-for explanation of 80,000 votes, as if it says something big and true about the whole electorate, will over-explain the outcome. An explanation that is one of the many valid ones for those 80,000 votes, and thus for the Electoral College outcome, but that implies some large shift in opinion or mood toward Trump, is a bad explanation overall.”

Jonathan Chait: “Donald Trump’s surprising (though not unforeseeable) election has provoked a wave of fear and anger among his opponents. But much of it has been misdirected into denial or despair rather than effective channels of political mobilization. The clearest symbol of this misplaced energy is the campaign to persuade members of the Electoral College to deny Donald Trump the presidency.”

“The first thing to note about this effort is that it is utterly hopeless… Second, and more important, denying Trump the presidency through an Electoral College coup is not a procedurally legitimate response… The final problem is that the campaign to prevent Trump’s election has turned the hopeless Electoral College gambit into a substitute for political organizing.”

“But there are better measures of horror at Trump and Trumpism than support for a hopeless and questionable tactic. The correct response should involve the protection and engagement of normal politics.”