More than a year after she ignored the state during her presidential campaign, 2016 Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton finally will grace Wisconsin with her presence Thursday as part of her 13-week book tour.
President Donald Trump — who campaigned in Wisconsin five times in the last three months before Election Day — snatched the victory from Clinton by just 1 percentage point, claiming its 10 electoral votes. As the Wisconsin State Journal noted back in November 2016, Clinton became the first major party nominee to skip campaigning in the state since 1972.
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“One of the wilder observations of 2016 was the fact that Hillary Clinton never (and I mean never) bothered to step foot in Wisconsin during the general election, even as Donald Trump’s voter base expanded throughout the Midwest,” the “One Year Of Hillary” project said in a press release Thursday. “The signs were there that voters in Wisconsin wanted face-to-face time with their candidates.”
But now that Clinton has embarked upon her tour promoting her 2016 election memoir, “What Happened,” the Riverside Theater in Milwaukee has found itself on her list of stops.
“Secretary Clinton took Wisconsin voters for granted and never visited them because she didn’t think doing so would benefit her. Now that she’s peddling a book, she thinks it will, so she’s going,” said Brian Anderson, the founder of the Saguaro Group, which launched the “One Year Of Hillary” project, Fox News reported.
“That’s all you need to know about ‘What Happened.’ With the Clintons, it has always been ‘with you when they need you,’ nothing more, nothing less,” Anderson continued.
The “One Year of Hillary” project’s press release added, “Luckily, Hillary Clinton will finally bless Wisconsin with her presence today — 12 months after she lost the most winnable election in American history — in order to promote her new book, appropriately titled ‘What Happened.'”
Trump became the first GOP presidential candidate to carry the Badger State since 1984 — a feat made even more incredible by the fact that he lost the state to Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) during the 2016 primaries.
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Although Clinton lamented in her new book that she would have beaten Trump “if just 40,000 people across Wisconsin, Michigan, and Pennsylvania had changed their minds,” she hasn’t fully embraced her share of the blame for losing those states on Election Day.
“For example, some critics have said that everything hinged on me not campaigning in the Midwest,” Clinton wrote. “And I suppose it is possible that a few more trips to Saginaw or a few more ads on the air on Waukesha could have tipped a couple thousand votes here and there.”
But according to Clinton, “we didn’t ignore those states” and “no one can say we weren’t doing everything possible to compete and win,” — although Wisconsin’s resounding rejection represented the “one place where we were caught by surprise.”
“I would have torn up my schedule, which was designed based on the best information we had, and camped out there,” Clinton continued, adding, “it’s just not credible that the best explanation for the outcome in those states — and therefore the election — was where I held rallies.”
(photo credit, homepage images: Hillary Clinton, Cut Out and Colored, CC BY-SA 2.0, by Gage Skidmore; photo credit, article images: Hillary Clinton, Cut Out and Colored, CC BY-SA 2.0, by Gage Skidmore)
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