Hillary Clinton’s list of excuses for why she lost the election keeps getting longer.
The former secretary of state has offered up a litany of scapegoats not named Hillary Clinton for her loss. She has already blamed her loss on “misogyny,”former FBI Director James Comey and WikiLeaks. Her aides have blamed “white supremacy” andthe media. Now, Clinton is adding to the list.
Clinton blamed alleged voter suppression for her loss during an interview with New York magazine published on Friday. Clinton, citing no evidence to support her claims, said that the alleged voter suppression was especially bad in Wisconsin, where low turnout hurt her campaign.
Left unmentioned, however, is the fact that Clinton virtually ignored Wisconsin during the general election. Clintondidn’t set foot in Wisconsinonce during her general election campaign, and ranalmost no campaign adsuntil shortly before the election.
Clinton claimed that “what I was doing was working. I would have won had I not been subjected to the unprecedented attacks by Comey and the Russians, aided and abetted by the suppression of the vote, particularly in Wisconsin.”
While searching for explanations after the election, some progressives seized on “voter suppression” — in the form of voter ID laws — as a reason Trump won. Even liberal news sources are having a tough time buying that line of reasoning, however. Reliably liberal fact-checker Snopes ruled the claim “unproven” because there wasno evidenceto support it, while liberal website Voxflat out rejected it.
Clinton’s blaming of voter suppression doesn’t appear to be an off-the-cuff remark.
The largest pro-Clinton super PAC during the 2016 election, Priorities USA, produced an “analysis” of voter turnout that claimed voter suppression had a “significant impact” on the electoral outcome.
Priorities USA Voter Suppression MemobyPriorities USA Presson Scribd
The super PAC then shared that memo offering cover for Clinton’s loss with left-wing publication The Nation, whichaccepted the super PAC’s claims uncritically, pushing out the headline, “Wisconsin’s Voter-ID Law Suppressed 200,000 Votes in 2016 (Trump Won by 22,748).”
Now, Clinton is pushing that unsupported claim as yet another reason for why she lost.
“Whoever comes next, this is not going to end,” she complained to NYMag. “Republicans learned that if you suppress votes you win.”
Another left-wing website,Talking Points Memo, noted Clinton’s accusations of voter suppression and piled on, claiming, “Criticism of Wisconsin’s strict voter ID laws has gained steam in recent months after a series of reports on the hundreds of thousands of people in that state who did not have sufficient identification to vote.”
The only source Talking Points Memo linked to to support its accusation was The Nation’s article that regurgitated the Clinton super PAC’s claims.
Former President Barack Obamaoffered a different explanationduring an interview in December: Clinton ignored rural voters.
“Democratic voters are clustered in urban areas and on the coasts so you’ve got a situation where they’re not only entire states but also big chunks of states where — if we’re not showing up — if we’re not in there making an argument, then we’re going to lose,” Obama said. “We can lose badly, and that’s what happened in this election.”
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