While Trump maintains there is no proof that the Russian assistance affected the election, the contours of that final month of campaigning and the closeness of the tally suggest that the opposite is true: that it is highly unlikely the Russian efforts did not affect the outcome.

“There’s no question that it mattered,” said Democratic pollster Mark Mellman. “There’s no question that they thought it mattered. There’s no question that the Hillary Clinton folks thought it mattered.”

Over the entire final month of the race, Trump essentially centered his campaign on talking about the emails stolen by Russian intelligence and then released through its allied group WikiLeaks. The messages, which were sent to and from Clinton campaign chair John Podesta, cast Clinton in a bad light. “We love WikiLeaks!” Trump would tell his rally crowds and live TV audiences, urging them to go to the website and read the emails for themselves. “Boy, do we love WikiLeaks.”

Democrats and even some Republican consultants said the Trump campaign would not have based its closing strategy on that theme if it were not working.

“You clearly wouldn’t do that if you didn’t think that was effective,” said Rick Tyler, a GOP consultant who worked for Texas Sen. Ted Cruz’s presidential campaign during the primaries.

Although Trump lost the popular tally by nearly 3 million votes nationally, he won three states that most observers expected to go to Clinton by a total margin of 77,744. Were the Russian efforts enough to have moved 77,744 votes in Wisconsin, Michigan and Pennsylvania?

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One Republican-leaning pollster, speaking on condition of anonymity, said the question is impossible to quantify with any certainty. To move that many votes in those three states, the pollster said, would mean moving about 600,000 votes nationally ― or about half a percentage point. That said, he added that Trump’s success in using WikiLeaks to hammer on about emails and thereby remind voters of Clinton’s biggest vulnerability ― the FBI probe into her emails ― clearly makes that kind of vote shift plausible.

“I’m much more open to the notion that it mattered,” he said.

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Tyler, the Republican consultant, wonders how Trump supporters can argue that the social media ads and fake stories had no impact, when it was exactly the sort of thing the Trump campaign was doing itself. “You can’t say that what you were doing was effective, but what the Russians were doing wasn’t effective,” he said.