‘She Didn’t Have the Decency’: Sulking Kamala Slinks Away

Former President Donald Trump has definitively won the 2024 presidential election. Even the lachrymose corporate media have begrudgingly conceded that fact. 

But it seems Vice President Kamala Harris has entered the witness relocation program. 

The Democrats’ replacement candidate was missing in action on election night, when she skipped her scheduled post-election appearance at her alma mater Howard University. 

Even as the writing was on the wall, as Election Day turned to the day after, Harris’ campaign chief Jen Brigid O’Malley-Dillon (the ultimate elitist-white-female-sounding name), told the dejected stragglers — by email — that Harris had left the building. Closing time. You don’t have to go home, but you can’t stay here. A campaign staffer brusquely told news film crews to shut her down and pack it up. 

But O’Malley-Dillon assured supporters and the sycophantic corporate press that while Trump may have clearly won, the election was far from over. 

“We’ve been saying for weeks that this race might not be called tonight. Those of you who were around in 2020 know this well: it takes time for all the votes to be counted — and all the votes will be counted. That’s how our system works,” she wrote in an email. 

In other words, no concession speech. Harris supporters at the Howard election night watch party stumbled away, confused. 

Even as the Democrats’ once-vaunted “blue wall” crumbled  — first electorally essential Pennsylvania, then red-again swing-state Wisconsin — it was crickets from Harris and her team. 

As the wee hours of the morning further confirmed Trump’s sweeping victory, not just in the left’s much-loathed Electoral College but the popular vote as well, Harris remained AWOL. 

‘She Didn’t Have the Decency’

The unpopular vice president who proved to be an even less popular presidential candidate ended up taking a worse electoral beating than Hillary Clinton. But even Barack Obama’s bitter former secretary of state could scrabble together enough grace to pick up the phone and call her hated political enemy when there remained no path to victory. 

“Last night, I congratulated Donald Trump and offered to work with him on behalf of our country,” Clinton said later in her official concession speech the day after the 2016 election. “I hope that he will be a successful president for all Americans. This is not the outcome we wanted or we worked so hard for, and I’m sorry that we did not win this election for the values we share and the vision we hold for our country.”

As of late morning, there were no reports of Harris reaching out to Trump to concede. Like much that has gone down in this race, the vice president’s long-delayed concession is rather unprecedented. 

Trump did not concede in the rigged 2020 election because the election was, as U.S. elections have come to be, not decided on election night. The margins in several battleground states were razor-thin and certainly contestable. 

That’s not the case in America’s redo in 2024. Given the chance at a do-over, Americans resoundingly rejected Harris and the past four years. 

Sources with the Harris camp finally whispered to corporate media outlets late Wednesday morning that the vice president would deliver a concession speech at 4 p.m. ET from Howard University, what was supposed to be the site of celebration — joy.  

But the damage is done. The delay makes the “manufactured candidate” look more than petulant. 

“Waiting a day to give her concession speech was a big mistake. By tomorrow, Kamala will literally be yesterday’s news. No one will even tune in,” venture capitalist David Sacks, who left the Biden-Harris train before its final explosive derailment, wrote on his X account.  

Barbara Heineback, who is the first black press office employee for the First Lady’s Office and a former White House staffer, told the UK’s Daily Mail that Harris let her down. Harris disappeared when Heineback believed Democrats still had a chance. 

“I am so disappointed and really insulted that I’m a Howard alum and that she didn’t have the decency to walk out and say to her, to her university, make a comment to the United States,” Heineback told the publication. “Things were not looking well for her. It wasn’t completely over.”

It is completely over. As well may be Kamala Harris’ unremarkable political career. 

I think even the most strident Democrat might concede that point today. 

Matt Kittle is a senior elections correspondent for The Federalist. An award-winning investigative reporter and 30-year veteran of print, broadcast, and online journalism, Kittle previously served as the executive director of Empower Wisconsin.