The invaluable Ari Berman at Mother Jones has an extraordinary examination about how an ongoing campaign of voter suppression in the state of Wisconsin, which my own reporting has told me is the worst kept secret in the history of that state’s politics, probably did throw that state’s electoral votes to the president* in 2016.

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.

Berman is particularly good in two areas here: 1) He brings the long game of voter suppression played by the state’s Republican party down to the streets of places like the north side of Milwaukee, which happens to be my old neighborhood, not that that matters significantly and, 2) he is scornful of the attempts by some on the putative left to minimize voter suppression as a factor in Hillary Rodham Clinton’s defeat.

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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.

And he also dredges up a quote that gives the entire game away, a quote I’d forgotten, which meant I could get angry about it all over again.

On the night of Wisconsin’s 2016 primary, GOP Rep. Glenn Grothman, a backer of the law when he was in the state Senate, predicted that a Republican would carry the state in November, even though Wisconsin had gone for Barack Obama by 7 points in 2012. “I think Hillary Clinton is about the weakest candidate the Democrats have ever put up,” he told a local TV news reporter, “and now we have photo ID, and I think photo ID is going to make a little bit of a difference as well.”

You would think that the one thing that could unite the squabbling Democratic factions is a strong effort to rescue the franchise from its avowed enemies. That, of course, would require some people to give up on the idea that HRC was absolutely the evilest evil that ever evil-ed. I make that a 50-50 shot at best.

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Charles P. Pierce Charles P Pierce is the author of four books, most recently Idiot America, and has been a working journalist since 1976.

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