Wisconsin loss surprised Clinton
New book details thoughts, strategy from before election
Hillary Clinton didn’t campaign in Wisconsin during last year’s general election, but her book managed to land in the state Tuesday.
And she’ll be coming to Wisconsin in November.
Only, instead of fighting for votes in a crucial battleground state, she’ll be on tour to share her story and promote her book, “What Happened,” during a Nov. 9 appearance at the Riverside Theater.
The cheapest seats go for $145.
The book is likely to reopen old wounds among Democrats, especially in Wisconsin, and draw a fresh round of derision from Republicans. It’s an upclose-and-personal look at the campaign from Clinton’s perspective. Wisconsin is but a tiny slice in a wider story.
Clinton became the first Democrat presidential nominee to fail to win Wisconsin since 1984. The defeat here was part of the crumbling of the socalled blue wall of states, as President Donald Trump won in Wisconsin, Michigan and Pennsylvania.
“For example, some critics have said that everything hinged on me not campaigning enough in the Midwest,” Clinton writes in her book. “And I suppose it is possible that a few more trips to Saginaw or a few more ads on the air in Waukesha could have tipped a couple of thousand votes here and there.”
“But let’s set the record straight,” Clinton writes. “We always knew that the industrial Midwest was crucial to our success, just as it had been for Democrats for decades, and contrary to the popular narrative, we didn’t ignore those states.”
Clinton lost badly here in the Democratic primary against independent U.S. Sen. Bernie Sanders of Vermont, and never returned to the state. Her planned June 2016 appearance in Green Bay with then-President Barack Obama was scratched in the wake of the shooting at the Pulse nightclub in Orlando.
She lost to Trump in Wisconsin by fewer than 23,000 votes.
Clinton acknowledges in the book: “If there’s one place where we were caught by surprise, it was Wisconsin. Polls showed us comfortably ahead, right up until the end. They also looked good for the Democrat running for Senate, Russ Feingold.”
Feingold was defeated by Republican U.S. Sen. Ron Johnson.
“We had 133 staff on the ground and spent nearly $3 million on TV, but if our data (or anyone else’s) had shown we were in danger, of course we would have invested even more,” she writes. “I would have torn up my schedule, which was designed based on the best information we had, and camped out there.”
Clinton notes that high-profile Democratic surrogates came to Wisconsin, including her vice presidential nominee, U.S. Sen. Tim Kaine of Virginia, then-Vice President Joe Biden and Sanders.
She writes that Trump “received roughly the same number of votes in Wisconsin that Mitt Romney did.
“There was no surge in Republican turnout,” she writes. “Instead, enough voters switched, stayed home, or went for third parties in the final days to cost me the state.”
She also discounts that she didn’t focus enough on an economic message.
As one example, she discusses the TV ad she filmed outside Johnson Controls, which was in the process of merging with Tyco. Under the deal, the firm would still be run in the Milwaukee area and incorporated in Ireland and subject to lower corporate taxes.
“It was so cold that day I could barely feel my feet, but I insisted on doing it because I was furious about the shell game the company was playing at the expense of its workers and the American people,” she writes. “I talked about Johnson Controls’ tax scheme virtually every day on the trail for months.”
Clinton points out that a small but perhaps significant number of voters cast ballots in Wisconsin and elsewhere for Green Party candidate Jill Stein, who received 31,000 votes in the state.
In discussing what she calls “voter suppression,” Clinton references studies and discusses the impact the state voter ID law may have had on the result.
“States with harsh new voting laws, such as Wisconsin, saw turnout dip 1.7 points, compared with a 1.3-point increase in states where the law didn’t change,” she writes.
She adds that a Priorities USA study estimated “that the new voter ID law helped reduce turnout by 200,000 votes (in Wisconsin), primarily from low-income and minority areas. We know for sure that turnout in the city of Milwaukee fell by 13 percent.”
PolitiFact Wisconsin said experts questioned the methodology of the Priorities USA study.