Hillary Clinton is a threat to democracy — at least according to Hillary Clinton.
The two-time failed presidential candidate commiserated with failed 2018 Georgia gubernatorial candidate Stacey Abrams this week, claiming they were both robbed of their respective elections.
Just ignore the vote counts — electoral in Clinton’s case, popular in Abrams’. Also, ignore the part where Clinton herself claimed in 2016 that questioning the results of American elections constitutes a direct attack on democracy.
“You can run the best campaign. You can have the best plans. You can get the nomination. You can win the popular vote. And you can lose the Electoral College and therefore the election,” Clinton said Tuesday at the Defense of Democracy Conference at Georgetown University. And she would know, because she did exactly three of those five things.
Clinton continued, adding that there are four specific reasons why someone with a perfect plan (har! har!) can still lose an election. “Number one,” she said, “Voter suppression. We saw what happened in Georgia where Stacey Abrams should be governor of that state.”
Clinton repeated several of the myths that we’ve been debunking repeatedly ever since the election. “Registered voters were kept off the rolls,” she said. “Their registrations just piled up in some back office with no intention to ever enroll them so that they could actually vote.”
For starters, Georgia Gov. Brian Kemp won the 2018 gubernatorial election with 50.2% of the vote, compared to Abrams’ 48.8%. She lost by approximately 54,723 votes. It wasn’t actually that close. But it could have gone to runoff, so let’s look at it a bit more closely.
Was turnout down because of voter suppression? No. Were there irregular or unusual purges of legitimate voters? No. These are urban legends, carefully planted before the election in order to delegitimize its result in advance. As I have written over and over again since 2018:
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Meanwhile, we have repeatedly debunked the associated conspiracy theories about vote suppression tactics. These conspiracy theories included then-Secretary of State Kemp’s supposed involvement in closing polling places (Democratic local officials made those calls to save money); supposedly excessive purges of former and deceased residents from voter rolls (a large number of purges came all at once because a long-running lawsuit over regular, smaller purges had just ended); and power cords that went missing at one busy polling place on election day (they were quickly found, and no one has ever credibly claimed they were stolen or hidden on purpose).
The saddest thing about this is: Clinton almost certainly keeps banging on about Abrams because it gives the former secretary of state an excuse to complain about her own “stolen” election.
“We also saw what happened in 2016. Experts estimate that anywhere from 27,000 to 200,000 Wisconsin citizen voters, predominantly in Milwaukee, were turned away from the polls,” Clinton said Tuesday. Uh, can you maybe narrow that number down a bit?
She added, “That’s a lot of potential voters. They showed up, but maybe they didn’t have the correct form of identification, maybe the name on their driver’s license included a middle name or initial that wasn’t on their voter registration, but officials made every excuse in the book to prevent certain people from voting in that election.”
As I wrote in 2017 and again in 2019 regarding this nonsense claim about Wisconsin residents being denied the right to vote:
Clinton’s numerical estimates on her fantasy she was robbed in 2016 by voter ID laws have also shifted dramatically with time. In 2017, she was going around saying that “200,000 people in Wisconsin were either denied or chilled in their efforts to vote.” The number she cited came from an Associated Press story which claimed (without any citation) that an estimated 300,000 eligible voters in Wisconsin “lacked valid photo IDs,” which is a huge number considering that IDs are required for nearly every transaction in life at the moment. The article did not claim any number of people had been blocked from voting. Most importantly, the article also admits it “is unknown how many people did not vote because they didn’t have proper identification.”
It’s funny. It was just a few years ago that Clinton said it was “denigrating” and “talking down our democracy” when then-GOP nominee Donald Trump declined to say whether he’d accept the outcome of the 2016 presidential election. It was just a few years ago that Clinton said, “That is not the way our democracy works,” when Trump suggested he might protest the outcome. Back then, Clinton said questioning the results of U.S. elections posed a “direct threat to our democracy.”
Wow — a Clinton preaching one thing while practicing another? Now I have seen everything.
