Dems Don’t Get Credit For Conceding. They Had No Other Options

Nearly 24 hours after the polls closed in the 2024 election, Kamala Harris finally publicly conceded the race to Donald Trump. She was out of options.

“We must accept the results of this election,” Harris told her supporters from a stage at Howard University in Washington, D.C., on Wednesday afternoon. “Earlier today, I spoke with President-election Trump and congratulated him on his victory. I also told him that … we will 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 added in a clear attack on Republicans, including Trump, who contested the procedures and results of the rigged 2020 election.

Earlier on Wednesday, the shrews of “The View” rehearsed the same talking points. “When the person you voted for does not win, you do not say the system must be broken or that it was rigged. You say, ‘It is what it is,’” said Sara Haines. “Unlike Donald Trump and his followers, I acknowledge that he won,” added Ana Navarro.

Of course, they “acknowledge that he won.” After their QUESTIONING ELECTION RESULTS IS A THREAT TO DEMOCRACY rhetoric from the past four years, what the heck other choice do they have? Their “we accept the results” posture started about five minutes ago — or, more precisely, the moment Trump questioned the results of the 2020 election. Before that, Democrats had for decades questioned pretty much every other election they had lost, which were all freer and fairer than 2020, by the way.

2016 is still fresh in Americans’ minds. Here are three minutes (of many) of Democrats calling Donald Trump an “illegitimate president” after that election and saying the contest was “stolen” from Hillary Clinton:

Democrats did the same thing in the 2000 election between George W. Bush and Al Gore, and then again when Bush beat John Kerry four years later, to the point of stalling the Electoral College vote certification. Democrats even spun up a wild conspiracy theory that Karl Rove had colluded with voting machine manufacturers to change vote tallies. Jerry Nadler and other Judiciary Committee Democrats called on the General Accountability Office to investigate whether the machines were used to steal the election.

In 1960, after Hawaii’s governor had initially certified the results for Republican candidate Richard Nixon and a recount was underway, Democrat John F. Kennedy arranged for “alternate electors” (gasp) to be appointed. Sound familiar?

In 2018, Stacey Abrams insisted she had won the race for governor of Georgia against Brian Kemp even though she had lost. There are more examples where these came from.

Everything changed in 2020. That election featured a deluge of mail-in ballots and “indefinitely confined” absentee voters under the cover of Covid. It included last-minute rule changes in battleground states like Wisconsin and Pennsylvania, as well as state officials taking unlawful actions such as counting ballots that arrived past Election Day without postmarks, meaning there was no telling when or from where the ballots had been mailed. In 2020, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg and his wife dumped hundreds of millions of dollars primarily into the blue areas of swing states, effectively turning local election offices into Democrat get-out-the-vote operations.

Then Zuckerberg and his ilk in Big Tech and the corporate media censored true stories exposing the Biden family’s corrupt foreign influence-peddling operation and pretended it was “Russian disinformation” and the result of a “hack and leak” operation — even after the FBI had authenticated the laptop. One poll showed that, had voters known about even one of the Biden family scandals that was suppressed in the runup to the 2020 election, 1 in 6 would have changed their vote. That alone could have tipped the election, notwithstanding all the other shenanigans, as the outcome came down to only about 44,000 votes across three swing states. Biden ultimately became the president, but any way you slice it, the election was rigged.

But Democrats couldn’t help themselves. Not only did they insist, against all evidence to the contrary, that the 2020 election was the “most secure in American history,” but they also vilified anyone who disagreed as an “election denier.” They labeled Trump a Nazi, a tyrant, and an insurrectionist, and his followers the same.

So they’ve really backed themselves into a corner on election results now. What choice do they have but to concede in 2024?

That’s not the only, or even the primary reason, Kamala Harris and her supporters conceded the election on Wednesday though. They also admitted defeat because they got whooped. Unlike the 2020 election, the margins in 2024 weren’t razor-thin. Trump beat Harris in a landslide. Democrats got their keisters handed to them.

As of now, Donald Trump sits with a whopping 295 Electoral College votes, with more likely to roll in from the Sunbelt. Democrats can’t even shriek about the popular vote — Trump appears to have won that too — rendering their typical attacks on the Electoral College moot.

So don’t be fooled by Democrats’ uncharacteristic acceptance of election results. It’s their only move right now. But I’m sure as soon as Donald Hitler oxymoronically leaves office in four years, they’ll rediscover their historic affinity for “election denial.”

Kylee Griswold is the managing editor of The Federalist. She previously worked as the copy editor for the Washington Examiner magazine and as an editor and producer at National Geographic. She holds a B.S. in communication arts/speech and an A.S. in criminal justice and writes on topics including feminism and gender issues, religion, and the media. Follow her on Twitter @kyleezempel.