Kamala Harris Calls Donald Trump to Concede Election
Kamala Harris called Donald Trump on Wednesday to concede the presidential race, and to urge him to be a president for “all Americans,” according to a campaign memo.
Harris is expected to give a concession speech later on Wednesday at Howard University.
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In the memo, campaign chair Jen O’Malley Dillon said that Harris also pledged to work with President Biden to ensure a peaceful transition to power — a pointed allusion to the violent transfer in 2020.
A Trump campaign spokesman confirmed that Harris had called to congratulate him on his “historic victory.”
“President Trump acknowledged Vice President Harris on her strength, professionalism, and tenacity throughout the campaign, and both leaders agreed on the importance of unifying the country,” said the spokesman, Steven Cheung.
O’Malley Dillon thanked her campaign staff for building a “first-rate, historic Presidential campaign in basically 90 days.”
“You stared down unprecedented headwinds and obstacles that were largely out of our control,” she wrote. “We knew this would be a margin of error race, and it was.”
She also noted that the rightward swing to Trump was less pronounced in the contested states, arguing that showed the campaign had an impact in countering the national mood.
“That speaks to both the work you did, and the scale of the challenge we ultimately couldn’t surmount,” she wrote.
O’Malley Dillon also said that losing the race was “unfathomably painful.”
“It is hard,” she wrote. “This will take a long time to process. But the work of protecting America from the impacts of a Trump Presidency starts now.”
Trump is poised to sweep all seven battleground states, though the race has not been called yet in Arizona and Nevada. The Republicans also took control of the U.S. Senate.
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