Vice President Kamala Harris formally acknowledged her loss to President-elect Donald J. Trump on Wednesday in a defiant and emotional speech, telling her supporters that “while I concede this election, I do not concede the fight that fueled this campaign.”
“Don’t you ever listen when anyone tells you something is impossible because it has never been done before,” said Ms. Harris, the first Black woman and person of South Asian descent to ascend as the nominee of a major political party. “You have the capacity to do extraordinary good in the world. And so to everyone who is watching, do not despair. This is not a time to throw up our hands. This is a time to roll up our sleeves.”
Ms. Harris, her voice cracking with emotion at times, made the final speech of her presidential campaign at Howard University, her alma mater, in Washington.
Many of her female supporters were crying as they left the campus’s grassy central yard.
Her 12-minute concession was more than Mr. Trump ever offered to President Biden and Ms. Harris after they defeated him in 2020. To this day, Mr. Trump has not conceded that race, in public or private. Now, he returns to the White House after a resounding win, still technically facing federal charges over his attempts to overturn that election.
On Wednesday, in what seemed a pointed reminder, Ms. Harris said she had called Mr. Trump earlier in the day to offer her congratulations — but also to promise that the Biden administration would “engage in a peaceful transfer of power.”
“A fundamental principle of American democracy is that when we lose an election, we accept the results,” she said. “That principle, as much as any other, distinguishes democracy from monarchy or tyranny, and anyone who seeks the public trust must honor it.”
The results, still trickling in as Ms. Harris spoke, showed her on track to lose both the national popular vote and the top seven battleground states. Ms. Harris ran a 107-day campaign under extraordinarily rare circumstances after Mr. Biden dropped out of the race and she ricocheted to the top of the Democratic ticket. But burdened by the legacy of her incumbency, and unwilling to articulate a meaningful separation from the unpopular Biden administration, Ms. Harris lost ground among most major groups of voters.
On Wednesday, the crowd of supporters gathered at Howard was far sparser than the one that had awaited her on Tuesday evening for her election night party. Jack Ludd, 79, showed up for the concession speech but had missed the watch party because he was tired after his fourth trip to Pennsylvania canvassing for the Harris campaign.
“The buses were almost empty,” remarked Mr. Ludd, a retired taxi driver from Washington, of each trip, which he perceived as a lack of enthusiasm that saw Ms. Harris underperform Mr. Biden across the country. Now, Mr. Ludd said, he feels “afraid” about the prospect of four more years under Mr. Trump.
“I don’t know what to expect,” he said. “I depend on Social Security.”
On Tuesday night, thousands of people had gathered with high enthusiasm at Howard, watching CNN on giant outdoor screens. They cheered and waved American flags when good news came in for Ms. Harris, like her unsurprising victory in California.
But when the results from the battleground states showed up, the crowd was largely silent as an anchor ticked through Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, Arizona, Georgia and North Carolina — she trailed in all — only celebrating when her soon-to-evaporate lead in Michigan was announced. Later in the evening, the Harris campaign shut off the sound to the television screens and started playing music after a CNN guest remarked that the election felt “more like 2016 than 2020.”
Ms. Harris’s sorority sisters, clad in the pink and green of the Alpha Kappa Alpha sorority, streamed slowly out of the campus. One broke her prayer to decline to speak with a reporter. Just before Ms. Harris officially lost Georgia, the song she chose for her campaign, “Freedom,” by Beyoncé — an ode to the journey of liberation of Black women from slavery — began blaring through loudspeakers.
Around 12:45 a.m., Cedric Richmond, a co-chair of Ms. Harris’s campaign, took the stage and told the rapidly thinning crowd that the vice president would not appear until the next day.
When she delivered her speech on Wednesday, Ms. Harris took a moment to address the young people watching.
“It is OK to feel sad and disappointed, but please know it’s going to be OK,” she said. “On the campaign, I would often say, ‘When we fight, we win.’ But here’s the thing, here’s the thing: Sometimes the fight takes a while. That doesn’t mean we won’t win.”
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