motherjones | On election night, Anthony was shocked to see Trump carry Wisconsin
by nearly 23,000 votes. The state, which ranked second in the nation in
voter participation in 2008 and 2012, saw its lowest turnout since 2000.
More than half the state’s decline in turnout occurred in Milwaukee,
which Clinton carried by a 77-18 margin, but where almost 41,000 fewer
people voted in 2016 than in 2012. Turnout fell only slightly in white
middle-class areas of the city but plunged in black ones. In Anthony’s
old district, where aging houses on quiet tree-lined streets are
interspersed with boarded-up buildings and vacant lots, turnout dropped
by 23 percent from 2012. This is where Clinton lost the state and, with
it, the larger narrative about the election.
Clinton’s stunning loss in Wisconsin was blamed on her failure to
campaign in the state, and the depressed turnout was attributed to a
lack of enthusiasm for either candidate. “Perhaps the biggest drags on
voter turnout in Milwaukee, as in the rest of the country, were the
candidates themselves,” Sabrina Tavernise of the New York Times wrote in a post-election dispatch that typified this line of analysis. “To some, it was like having to choose between broccoli and liver.”
The impact of Wisconsin’s voter ID law received almost no attention.
When it did, it was often dismissive. Two days after the election, Talking Points Memo
ran a piece by University of California-Irvine law professor Rick Hasen
under the headline “Democrats Blame ‘Voter Suppression’ for Clinton
Loss at Their Peril.” Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker said it was “a load of crap” to claim that the voter ID law had led to lower turnout. When Clinton, in an interview with New York magazine, said her loss was “aided and abetted by the suppression of the vote, particularly in Wisconsin,” the Washington Examiner
responded, “Hillary Clinton Blames Voter Suppression for Losing a State
She Didn’t Visit Once During the Election.” As the months went on,
pundits on the right and left turned Clinton’s loss into a case study
for her campaign’s incompetence and the Democratic Party’s broader
abandonment of the white working class. Voter suppression efforts were
practically ignored, when they weren’t mocked.
Stories like Anthony’s went largely unreported. An analysis by Media Matters for America
found that only 8.9 percent of TV news segments on voting rights from
July 2016 to June 2017 “discussed the impact voter suppression laws had
on the 2016 election,” while more than 70 percent “were about Trump’s
false claims of voter fraud and noncitizen voting.” During the 2016
campaign, there were 25 presidential debates but not a single question
about voter suppression. The media has spent countless hours
interviewing Trump voters but almost no time reporting on
disenfranchised voters like Anthony.
Three years after Wisconsin passed its voter ID law in 2011, a federal judge blocked it,
noting that 9 percent of all registered voters did not have the
required forms of ID. Black voters were about 50 percent likelier than
whites to lack these IDs because they were less likely to drive or to be
able to afford the documents required to get a current ID, and more
likely to have moved from out of state. There is, of course, no one
thing that swung the election. Clinton’s failings, James Comey’s
11th-hour letter, Russian interference, fake news, sexism, racism, and a
struggling economy in key swing states all contributed to Trump’s
victory. We will never be able to assign exact proportions to all the
factors at play. But a year later, interviews with voters, organizers,
and election officials reveal that, in Wisconsin and beyond, voter
suppression played a much larger role than is commonly understood.
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