What a difference a blown election makes.
Hillary Clinton still hasn’t gotten over 2016. And now she has added the 2018 Georgia gubernatorial race to the list of U.S. elections she claims were stolen by Republicans. This from the woman who once said it was a “direct threat to our democracy” to question the results of an American election.
“We know, don’t we, that candidates both black and white have lost their races because they have been deprived of the votes they otherwise would have gotten,” Clinton said this weekend during an address at the 54th annual “Bloody Sunday” commemorative service at the Brown Chapel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Selma, Ala.
She added, “And the clearest example is from next door in Georgia. Stacey Abrams should be governor, leading that state right now.”
Abrams lost last year to Georgia’s then-Secretary of State Brian Kemp, who won 50.2 percent of the vote compared to her 48.8 percent. That’s close, but not that close.
The Democratic challenger didn’t go quietly. Abrams called for a new election. Abrams also pinned her hopes on absentee and provisional ballots triggering a runoff. Neither worked. Clinton claimed at the time: “If she had a fair election, [Abrams] already would have won.”
Abrams eventually ended her campaign, though she refused to concede. She and her supporters in politics and media have alleged ever since, without evidence, that Kemp stole the election by suppressing voter turnout.
On Sunday, Clinton added her own weight to the cause of delegitimizing the 2018 Georgia gubernatorial race, claiming outright that it was stolen by Republicans. And the failed presidential candidate wasn’t content to leave it at just that. Naturally, Clinton tied it all back to her own botched attempt to run for president in 2016, claiming that voter suppression — not a lack of interest in her candidacy by voters who had supported former President Barack Obama — is what ultimately carried President Trump to victory.
“I was the first person who ran for president without the protection of the Voting Rights Act and I will tell you, it makes a really big difference,” Clinton complained Sunday. “Between 2012, the prior presidential election where we still had the Voting Rights Act, and 2016, when I was on the ballot, there were fewer voters in Georgia than there were in the prior election. Think about it.”
I thought about it, per her recommendation, and this is what I found: 3.9 million votes were cast in Georgia during the 2012 presidential election, while a larger 4.1 million votes were cast four years later in the 2016 presidential election. Further, an estimated 2.5 million votes were cast in Georgia during 2014 midterm elections, while an estimated 3.9 million were cast during last year’s midterm cycle. It really makes you think.
Clinton continued Sunday, saying, “It doesn’t just make a difference in Alabama and Georgia. It made a difference in Wisconsin where the best studies that have been done said somewhere between 40,000 and 80,000 people were turned away from the polls because of the color of their skin, because of their age, because of whatever excuse could be made up to stop a fellow American citizen from voting.”
This number, by the way, is utter nonsense. In Wisconsin, a grand total of about 600 people had to cast provisional ballots in the 2016 election because they showed up at the polls without the required ID. That’s it. Not thousands, not tens of thousands, but a few hundred in the entire state. And hundreds of those votes were ultimately counted, too, if they got back to their county elections boards with proof of their identity. And there are no reports of anyone being turned away from voting because of “the color of their skin” or because of “their age.”
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.”
Also, it’s probably worth mentioning Clinton did not set foot in Wisconsin for the whole of the 2016 general election.
As for Georgia, despite abundant propaganda suggesting otherwise at the time, the local media pretty much gave the 2018 election a clean bill of health, at least as to people’s ability to vote and the lack of any systematic irregularities. Yet here we are, blaming dastardly voter suppression tactics and other shadowy Republican-led conspiracies for the loss of both Georgia’s governor’s mansion and the White House.
And to think: 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 presidential election if he lost. 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. It was just a few years ago that Clinton said that questioning results of an American election posed a “direct threat to our democracy.”
What a difference a lost election makes.
Ironically enough, Clinton was also awarded the International Unity Award Sunday morning at the Martin Luther King and Coretta Scott King Unity Breakfast in Selma.
“She was elected president of the United States, and it was stolen from her,” the presenter of the award said to a standing ovation. “It was stolen from her by the FBI … it was stolen from her by the Russians.”
Unity indeed.
