Hillary Clinton formally concedes defeat the day after the 2016 presidential election.
Photo: Justin Sullivan/Getty Images
Most viewers of the October 1 vice-presidential candidate debate, even those who thought J.D. Vance won overall, had to acknowledge that his weakest moment was right at the end, when he evaded questions about his running mate’s insurrectionary denial of defeat in 2020 and tried to depict Facebook “censorship” of news stories as a bigger threat to democracy than the violence Trump supporters carried out on January 6, 2021. Notably and fatuously, Vance argued that Trump’s agreement to move out of the White House peacefully before Biden inauguration following the failure of the MAGA insurrection proved he had accepted defeat (never mind that Trump has repeated his election denial claims hundreds of times since then and has made the alleged theft of the presidency a major theme of his 2024 campaign). But Vance also sneaked in a line of defense that should have drawn more attention as completely outrageous:
[W]e have to remember that for years in this country, Democrats protested the results of elections. Hillary Clinton in 2016 said that Donald Trump had the election stolen by Vladimir Putin because the Russians bought, like, $500,000 worth of Facebook ads. This has been going on for a long time. And if we want to say that we need to respect the results of the election, I’m on board. But if we want to say, as Tim Walz is saying, that this is just a problem that Republicans have had. I don’t buy that.
Let’s be clear about this. Hillary Clinton reached out to Donald Trump to concede defeat five minutes after the Associated Press and other media outlets called the race for the Republican in the wee hours of November 9, 2016. She made a formal concession speech later that day, and there was zero ambiguity about her acceptance of the results:
I still believe in America and I always will. And if you do, then we must accept this result and then look to the future. Donald Trump is going to be our president. We owe him an open mind and the chance to lead.
Clinton and her campaign did not challenge the results nationally or in any state subsequently. Yes, there were some isolated efforts by individual House Democrats to object to this or that state’s electoral-vote confirmation on January 6, 2017, mostly to dramatize incidents of GOP voter suppression, but none were supported by Hillary Clinton, and all were ruled out of order by presiding officer and Vice-President Joe Biden. Three years later, Clinton allowed as how Russian interference may have had a decisive effect on Trump’s victory, but she never pursued any vindication of that theory.
By contrast, Trump never conceded defeat in 2020, and still hasn’t to this very day. Indeed, he claimed victory on Election Night based on what he most definitely knew was a temporary lead that would soon be reversed as many million perfectly legal mail ballots were counted. His campaign pursued a blizzard of dubious voter-fraud claims, all of which (with the minor exception of a challenge to a detail of how Pennsylvania counted mail ballots, which didn’t involve enough ballots to matter) were rejected by the courts. But he pressed on, convening fake elector panels, pursuing obscure and asinine legal theories for rejecting state-certified (including Republican state-certified) results, coercing Vice-President Mike Pence to toss out Biden-won electoral votes, and when all that failed, encouraging a mob to “stop the steal” at the Capitol.
Comparing Trump’s actions to Clinton’s is absurd on its face, but beyond that, Vance is refusing to acknowledge that Trump’s conduct with respect to the 2020 results is without parallel in the era since 1887, when federal laws first established a clear timeline for decisively determining presidential-election winners. Formal concessions by defeated presidential candidates became a custom in 1896. Since then every loser has conceded, other than Trump. Yes, in 1916 a grumpy Charles Evans Hughes waited two weeks before congratulating Woodrow Wilson. And of course, in 2000, Al Gore didn’t throw in the towel until active litigation over dead-even and decisive Florida was resolved, but he conceded the minute the U.S. Supreme Court ruled against him in Bush v. Gore, and never for a moment depended on goons to intimidate his opponents. Losers of other very close races like Richard Nixon in 1960, Hubert Humphrey in 1968, Gerald Ford in 1976, and John Kerry in 2004 all conceded within 24 hours of the polls closing on Election Day.
Donald Trump stands alone as the ultimate sore loser who can’t even admit he lost years later. And more to the point, he’s given every indication he’ll behave in exactly the same way if he loses on or soon after November 5. For J.D. Vance to pretend this is just what all politicians do is a total crock.
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