Kamala Harris conceded the 2024 presidential election on Wednesday, after Donald Trump won an overwhelming victory to secure another four years in the White House.
Speaking from Howard University, her alma mater in Washington, DC, on Wednesday afternoon, Harris said she had called the former Republican president earlier in the day to congratulate him.
“We must accept the results of this election,” Harris said. “I also told him that we will help him and his team with their transition and that we will engage in a peaceful transfer of power.”
Trump’s campaign said the two candidates had “agreed on the importance of unifying the country”. Trump had noted Harris’s “strength, professionalism and tenacity throughout the campaign”, a statement from his spokesperson said.
Harris told supporters on Wednesday that she remained proud of her campaign effort and would continue to “fight” for democratic ideals, saying she knew “many people feel like we are entering a dark time”.
At the end of a campaign in which she repeatedly accused her opponent of threatening democracy, Harris told her supporters not to give up the fight for the country’s foundational ideals, saying: “In our nation, we owe loyalty not to a president or party, but to the Constitution of the United States.”
“While I concede this election, I do not concede the fight that fuelled this campaign,” Harris said.
The vice-president had originally been expected to speak to a large crowd of supporters at the historically Black college on Tuesday night. But she did not appear at her own election night party after vote counts made it clear that she was on course to lose to her Republican rival.
Trump was declared the winner early on Wednesday morning after sweeping critical battlegrounds in the south and industrial Midwest and securing the 270 electoral college votes needed to win the White House. But on Wednesday he also remained on track to win the popular vote, something no Republican has done in two decades.
“America has given us an unprecedented and powerful mandate,” Trump said in a victory speech in the early hours of Wednesday morning, predicting a “golden age” for the US under his leadership.
Harris was far from the only Democrat to suffer defeat at the ballot box on Tuesday. The Democratic party will cede control of the US Senate after Republicans successfully flipped three seats in West Virginia, Ohio and Montana.
Control of the House of Representatives still hangs in the balance, with dozens of races left to be called, but Republicans remain bullish on their chances of holding on to the lower chamber of Congress.
That would give Trump’s party a “unified government”, with control over the White House, Senate and House, and wide latitude to push through the president-elect’s legislative agenda.
The White House said President Joe Biden — who defeated Trump four years ago but abandoned his own re-election bid over the summer — had also called the Republican president-elect on Wednesday to congratulate him and invite him to a meeting at the White House. Biden is expected to make his own address to the nation on Thursday.
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