Hillary Clinton did not set foot in Wisconsin for the whole of the 2016 general election.
Not once.
The former secretary of state defends the decision to this day, arguing that her campaign data showed she personally didn't need to bother with the Badger State. That's reasonable. After all, data is fallible.
What's embarrassing is that Clinton has expanded her list of excuses for why she lost Wisconsin to include "fake news," WikiLeaks emails and allegations that Gov. Scott Walker suppressed the vote.
Conspicuously absent from her list of excuses is any mention of the fact that she didn't campaign in Wisconsin.
Clinton was pressed for answers on her campaign blunder Wednesday afternoon by Verge editor-in-chief Nilay Patel, who is himself from the Badger State.
"I'm from Wisconsin. Why didn't you spend more time in Wisconsin?" he asked to audible gasps at the Recode conference in Rancho Palos Verdes, Calif.
"We thought we were doing really well in Wisconsin. I spent a lot of time in Pennsylvania, a lot of time in Florida. We sent a lot of great surrogates, including [Sen. Tim Kaine, D-Va.] and others to Wisconsin you make these scheduling decisions based on the best information that you have, and it turned out that, you know, our information was not as reliable as I wished it had been," Clinton said.
Clinton also blamed her loss on Scott Walker's support for voter ID laws, accusing the Republican governor of being part of a larger effort to disenfranchise voters.
"The other thing that's in hindsight, which is really troubling is the [Associated Press] did a really well-researched piece about voter suppression in Wisconsin, and they literally found people who showed up to vote and were turned away because Wisconsin, under the current governor, Scott Walker, has been one of the leaders in voter suppression. Making it difficult," the failed presidential candidate said.
The article to which Clinton referred Wednesday is titled "Voter ID law proved insurmountable for many in Wisconsin."
Clinton said, "The best estimate is that 200,000 people in Wisconsin were either denied or chilled in their efforts to vote. I don't think we believed at the time before the election that it would be anything like that. Anything as big as that."
Roughly 300,000 eligible voters in Wisconsin "lacked valid photo IDs" ahead of the 2016 election, the AP story reported.
However, the article, which was published on May 9, does not provide citation for its number. Further, the report also stated specifically that, "It is unknown how many people did not vote because they didn't have proper identification."
Well then.
Clinton wasn't done: She also blamed the WikiLeaks email scandal and a rash of "fake news" stories for distorting Wisconsin voters' perception of her as a presidential candidate.
"So some people stayed home. Some people voted for Trump. Some people stayed with me, and some people went third party," she said. "It was a confluence of all kinds of things."
Sure, it was a confluence of events, not least of all the fact that she never visited the damned state. You know who could've cleared up those supposed "fake news" misconceptions about Hillary Clinton? Hillary Clinton.
Trump won Wisconsin by more than 20,000 votes, a margin of victory that actually increased during a hotly contested recount effort.
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Hillary Clinton blames voter suppression for losing a state she didn't visit once during the election - Washington Examiner