Kamala Harris formally conceded the election to Donald Trump on Wednesday, urging Americans devastated by the result to “not despair” but to stay engaged and remain vigilant in the fight to protect American democracy.
Under a dramatic yellow sky, the vice-president arrived on stage to chants of “Kamala!” from the grounds of her alma mater, Howard University, in Washington. She spoke in the afternoon, after Trump surged past the 270 votes needed to win the electoral college, a stunning political comeback from four years ago, when his refusal to concede power culminated in a violent attack on the seat of American government.
“While I concede this election, I do not concede the fight that fueled this campaign,” said Harris, her voice hoarse after a whirlwind 13-week campaign. “Hear me when I say: the light of America’s promise will always burn bright, as long as we never give up.”
Earlier in the day, Harris had called Trump to congratulate him on his victory and pledged that the Biden administration would “engage in a peaceful transfer of power”. As the vice-president, she will play the ceremonial role of president of the Senate during the certification of Trump’s victory in January.
“In our nation, we owe loyalty not to a president or a party, but to the constitution of the United States,” Harris said, drawing loud applause when she committed to help Trump’s team transition to the White House.
Harris seemed to acknowledge the fear among her supporters, who agreed with her warnings that Trump posed an existential threat to the future of American democracy and the planet. But she said now was not a time to “throw up our hands”.
“This is a time to organize, to mobilize and to stay engaged for the sake of freedom and justice and the future that we all know we can build together,” she said.
The vice-president’s public concession marked the end of a tumultuous election that lasted just more than 100 days, the shortest in modern memory after the president stepped aside and effectively anointed her his successor weeks before the party’s summer convention.
By Wednesday afternoon, Trump, the twice impeached former president who has been convicted of dozens of crimes and is accused of many more, had won at least five of the seven battleground states and was on track to claim the popular vote. Unlike in 2016, when Trump won a shock electoral victory against Hillary Clinton but lost the popular vote, he will return to power with what he called an “unprecedented and powerful mandate”.
Republicans easily flipped the US Senate, and they appeared within range of keeping control of the US House, a scenario that would give Trump’s party control of all levels of elected government in Washington.
The Howard address was Harris’s first public appearance since Tuesday afternoon, when she stopped by the Democratic National Committee headquarters in Washington to thank phone-bankers working to get out the vote before polls closed. Later that night, supporters had awaited her at the campaign’s campus watch party. But as hope turned to despair, a campaign co-chair, Cedric Richmond, appeared instead to inform attendees that she would not be speaking.
On Wednesday, several of Harris’s supporters, many tearful, said they had came to bid a painful farewell to Harris’s historic candidacy – and to a presidential nominee they had hoped might finally shatter the nation’s “highest, hardest” glass ceiling.
“I’ve been at this a long time and this time I really thought we were going to do it,” said Joanne Howes, a founding member of Emily’s List, an influential fundraising group that supports Democratic female candidates who back abortion rights. “We’re going to feel sad and sorrowful, but then we have to get up again. We can’t just accept that our democracy is over.”
Harris, the first Black woman and first south Asian to become the presidential nominee of a major political party, ran a tightly choreographed campaign, blanketing the battleground states with visits and television ads, while embracing the traditional Democratic get-out-the-vote efforts, including phone-banking and door-knocking. On the Saturday before the election, her campaign said people had knocked more than 800,000 doors in all-important Pennsylvania – a figure that was more than 10 times Biden’s 2020 margin of victory in the state. On Monday, the vice-president even knocked a few doors herself.
Harris framed her campaign around the theme of freedom and vowed to be a president for “all Americans”. She tried to craft an optimistic, forward-looking vision that spoke to Americans’ pervasive economic anxieties while also warning of the threat Trump posed to democratic institutions.
For nearly the entire campaign, opinion polls showed an exceedingly close race, in stark contrast with Trump’s decisive victory. Her campaign had projected optimism in the final days, pointing to data they said showed undecided voters breaking their way after a racist joke at Trump’s grievance-fueled Madison Square Garden rally sparked a backlash among Puerto Rican celebrities and artists. At her campaign’s final rally in Philadelphia, Ricky Martin performed and Fat Joe implored fellow Latinos to back Harris: “When is enough enough?”
But the country was angry and disillusioned, furious with the incumbent party and hungry for change it saw in the norm-shattering former president. In the end, Trump made gains in nearly every corner of the country and across nearly every demographic group.
On Wednesday, standing in front of the campus’s Frederick Douglass Memorial Hall, Harris spoke directly to the young people watching. “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,” she said.
Concluding her brief remarks, Harris, a self-described “joyful warrior”, invoked what she called “a law of history”, citing the adage: “Only when it is dark enough can you see the stars”.
“I know many people feel like we are entering a dark time – and for the benefit of us all, I hope that is not the case,” she said. “But America, if it is, let us fill the sky with the light of a brilliant, billion stars. The light of optimism, of faith, of truth and service.”
Beyoncé’s Freedom played one last time, as the vice-president turned from the lectern and exited the stage.
Read more of the Guardian’s 2024 US election coverage
