The smaller the number, the less clearly one can point at a single cause though, right? I mean, to an extreme, say it had been a 1 vote difference. There's millions of factors that can make a vote happen or not (that one voter could've slept in because their alarm broke, that one voter could've gotten sick that day, etc). One vote is an extreme case, but for 80k I can think of a lot of factors that would normally be "small" but suddenly play a sizable amount of importance.
- That's 80k Democrats who didn't go to vote. - That's well within the territory of gerrymandering. - That's a tiny fraction of the African American population, where Hillary was notoriously weak. - That's well within the viewership of many Fox News shows and segments. - As the article stated, you could fit these people in a mid-sized football stadium. That's within the territory of having a weak last month of campaign touring, or aggressively getting more rallies done.
Just to mention a few. And yes, also means it COULD have been CA— perhaps they weren't as influential as they claimed but 80k is not a large number, they perhaps could've influenced that many people.
I'm just wondering if there's a lot of attention being put on this factor, vs other factors that at this scale could've feasibly swayed in the election.