By Alexis Simendinger & Kristina Karisch
Vice President Harris’s speech Wednesday about President-elect Trump’s decisive victory on Election Day made no mention of how he won or why she lost.
It was a concession address that conceded little beyond an admonition to a teary-eyed mass of supporters at Washington’s Howard University that “we must accept the results of this election.”
With a hoarse voice and a slight frown, Harris delivered a don’t-stop-believing message to voters, some of whom are mired in turmoil about Trump’s recapture of the nation’s political future.
“I do not concede the fight that fueled this campaign,” Harris said. The fight to protect the Constitution — not a president, she added — will be waged in “voting booths, in the courts and in the public square.” Harris issued a fresh call to the anti-Trump resistance.
In the meantime, Democrats are faced with a reckoning about voters’ rejection of President Biden’s leadership and skepticism about Harris’s claims to being both a loyal lieutenant and an agent of “change.” Did Democrats lose the White House, Senate control and potentially the House majority because of their own mistakes, or because Trump succeeded in welding together “a movement,” as he calls his unique (and male-centered) coalition.
▪ NBC News: “This is a realignment”: Shattered Democrats grapple with Harris’s loss.
▪ The Wall Street Journal: The vice president’s campaign lost after raising and spending $1.2 billion (twice as much as the Trump campaign) from millions of donors. Her team spent more than $654.6 million on ads after she took over as nominee on July 22.
Biden, the target since the spring of mounting criticism from members of his party, will deliver a speech today about the election results. His distaste for Trump is clear. He is expected to deploy graciousness with gritted teeth. Republicans say they will seek to unwind the legislative achievements Biden repeatedly championed during his term beginning in January. Harris’s defeat on election night swept the one-term Biden presidency into a political dust bin. Democrats are in a quandary about where to head next on inflation and the economy, border security and defense of the rule of law.
While Republican voters have shown the biggest shift on immigration, a particularly potent issue wielded by Trump during three campaigns, Democrats and independents have also moved to the right, according to polls. Republicans, Democrats and independents interviewed by The New York Times blamed the Biden administration for failing to take aggressive steps to address chaos at the U.S. southern border.
▪ The Hill: Trump is the projected winner in swing state Arizona. His electoral tally today is 312 to Harris’s 226.
▪ Time magazine: How Trump won.
▪ Times analysis: In the end, Trump is not the historical aberration some thought he was, but instead a transformational force reshaping the modern United States in his own image.
The former president campaigned with a long list of legislative and executive promises, many missing key details. He has pledged mass deportations, new fossil fuel drilling and a U.S. pullback on assistance to allies abroad, including Ukraine. The Hill’s Niall Stanage reports on winners and losers from Tuesday’s presidential contest.
