Vice President Kamala Harris launched her presidential campaign from a standing start three months ago. And Wednesday afternoon it came to an end, unable to overcome Donald Trump’s sweeping wins in former Democratic strongholds.
Harris walked out for her final speech of the campaign on the Yard at her alma mater Howard University, in front of a crowd dotted with reddened eyes and cheeks wet with tears. As she had so many times on the campaign trail, Harris entered to the sound of Beyoncé’s “Freedom.” This time, the song’s lines “a winner don’t quit on themselves” hit differently. As Harris spoke, the crowd’s energy was dulled by the stinging loss.
“My heart is full today,” Harris told her supporters, many of whom had been in the same spot in front of Frederick Douglass Memorial Hall the night before hoping for a different outcome. Someone in the crowd shouted, “We love you!” and Harris replied, “I love you back!” She went on to say that she is “full of love for our country and full of resolve.” She said she is “so proud” of the race she ran “and the way we ran it.”
She had wanted it to be a victory speech, not a concession, but she said she was willing to accept the outcome, and she expected everyone else to as well. Harris drew a contrast to how Trump handled his defeat to Joe Biden in 2020. Trump refused to accept his loss and fomented a violent riot at the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021 to try to overturn it. “I know folks are feeling and experiencing a range of emotion right now—I get it,” Harris said with a small smile, alluding to some of the personal toll the campaign’s roller coaster has taken. When she mentioned Trump had won the election, boos moved through the crowd. “We must accept the results,” Harris said.
Harris made a point of saying that she and President Joe Biden will engage in a “peaceful transfer of power,” which she described as an act that “distinguishes democracy from monarchy or tyranny.” In a pointed critique of Trump’s public demands for loyalty from those who work for him, Harris said that Americans “owe loyalty not to a President or a party, but to the Constitution of the United States.”
Harris insisted that while the campaign was over, her work wasn’t done. “While I concede this election, I do not concede the fight that fueled this campaign,” she said. She pledged to keep working to ensure women “have the freedom to make decisions about their own body” and fight for rule of law and equal justice.
She implored Americans to treat “one another with kindness and respect” and “use our strength to lift people up.”
She wanted kids watching to know that “it is going to be ok.” She said that her chant on the campaign trail, “when we fight, we win,” is still true. But, she added, “sometimes the fight takes a while–that doesn’t mean we won’t win.”
The crowd listened intently but lacked the sparkling energy that had marked many of her rallies during her three-month sprint for the White House. She filled arenas with people chanting “We’re not going back,” and crowds eager to hear her describe how, as an attorney general in California, she’d prosecuted predators, fraudsters and cheaters, as she wound up to her punchline: “I know Donald Trump’s type.”
Her central pitch to voters, that she’d “turn the page” on Trump and work to protect access to abortion and lower costs for middle-class families, didn’t break through. Her message was swamped by Trump’s inflammatory descriptions of immigrants and murderers and rapists, his attacks on critics as the “enemy within,” and his insistence that only he could fix the country’s high prices and immigration challenges.
In parting, Harris said she wanted to leave the crowd with a reminder of an adage that says “Only when it is dark enough can you see the stars.” Harris said she knows people feel the country is “entering a dark time” and she hopes that is not the case. “If it is, let us fill the sky with the light of a brilliant, brilliant billion of stars.”
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