Kamala Harris has been slammed for waiting hours to concede the 2024 election to Donald Trump as the results painted a bleak picture at the scale of her loss.
The vice president finally called the president-elect just before 2pm Eastern Time on Wednesday and told him about the importance of the ‘peaceful transfer of power’.
As it stands, the vice president is on track to do worse than Hillary Clinton’s 2016 presidential election. She could even be on pace to have the worst Electoral College result of any Democrat since the 1988 race.
The world was shocked as the results favoring Trump trickled in Tuesday night as many polls indicated that Harris had a slight lead heading into Election Day.
Trump has blown that prediction up completely and has so far taken in the lion’s share of the popular vote too, securing 51 percent to Harris 47.5 percent as of Wednesday morning with most of the nation’s votes counted.
If that lead stands, it would mark the first time a Republican has won the popular vote in 20 years, since George Bush’s 2004 win, indicating a high-water mark of Republican enthusiasm the party has not seen in decades.
Trump now becomes the first president in over 130 years – and only the second in history – to win a non-consecutive second term.
His beating Harris marks a remarkable return for a twice-impeached president, who left office in 2021 on the back of claims that he had incited an assault on the U.S. Capitol building, and who was convicted earlier this year on multiple counts of business fraud.
His victory included winning all of the traditional ‘Blue Wall’ states of Wisconsin, Michigan and Pennsylvania. Michigan was called by the Associated Press for Trump on Wednesday afternoon.
Nevada, which split for Biden in 2020, has yet to be called by the Associated Press, though Trump looks poised to win the Silver State’s six Electoral College votes with 85 percent of the vote counted there.
Still, the Democratic nominee has not addressed the outcome of the presidential election, which the Associated Press called as a victory for Trump around 5:30 am ET on Wednesday morning.
The Democrat deliver a speech at her alma mater Howard University in Washington, D.C., on Wednesday around 4 pm ET, nearly 12 hours after the race was called.
