During her quasi-concession speech Wednesday, Vice President Kamala Harris told supporters she had called President-elect Donald Trump earlier in the day to congratulate him on his victory. Then came the knife.
Harris said, “I also told him we will help him and his team with their transition and 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. That principle, as much as any other, distinguishes democracy from monarchy or tyranny.”
The next day, President Joe Biden addressed the nation from the Rose Garden. Early in his remarks, he reiterated Harris’s commitment to a peaceful transfer of power.
Biden said, “Yesterday, I spoke with President-elect Trump to congratulate him on his victory. And I assured him that I would direct my entire administration to work with his team to ensure a peaceful and orderly transition. That’s what the American people deserve.”
Their mutual emphasis on a “peaceful and orderly transition” was clearly intended to mock Trump for contesting the results of the 2020 election. It was akin to saying, “We are so virtuous, and Trump is so vile and contemptible.”
Let’s enlighten them.
First, despite Democratic pollsters telling voters every day that the race was “neck and neck,” Trump’s 2024 victory was decisive. There is nothing to contest.
Trump swept every battleground state, some by wide margins. He won the popular vote by more than 3 points. The last Republican candidate to do so was former President George W. Bush in 2004.
Trump even managed to cut Biden’s margins of victory in deep blue states such as New York, New Jersey, and Illinois by 50% and nearly in half in California.
Perhaps the most instructive moment from election night came from CNN. Jake Tapper and John King were standing in front of an interactive electoral map, and Tapper asked King to show him the counties where Harris had outperformed Biden.
After the map went completely dark, Tapper said, “Holy smokes. Literally nothing, literally not one county.”
Second, after the many “anomalies” that occurred during the 2020 election cycle, the GOP was prepared for foul play ahead of the 2024 election. In April, the Trump campaign and the Republican National Committee announced the launch of an election integrity program. According to the RNC’s press release, this program was designed “to have over 100,000 dedicated volunteers and attorneys deployed across every battleground state as part of the RNC’s commitment to ensuring transparency and fairness in the 2024 elections.”
Trump is quoted in the memo: “Having the right people to count the ballots is just as important as turning out voters on Election Day. Republicans are now working together to protect the vote and ensure a big win on November 5th!”
At the time this program was launched, I had little faith that it would actually help. However, happily, I was wrong. It spotted irregularities as they occurred, filed lawsuits immediately, and most of the cases were resolved by the courts before Election Day.
Fox News reported that by mid-October, “at least 165 election-related lawsuits had already been filed.” The cases involved concerns such as voter eligibility, “how ballots are cast and counted, and how to ensure election security and protect against alleged voter fraud.”
Although the majority of the lawsuits were filed in battleground states, the most high-profile case involved Virginia’s removal of 1,600 noncitizens from state voter rolls ahead of the election. After two lower courts ordered the state to restore the names, Gov. Glenn Youngkin (R-VA) appealed the case to the Supreme Court and won.
Third, Harris’s defeat is no mystery. She is a liar and a terrible candidate. No one explained Harris’s flaws quite as well as the National Review’s Jeffrey Blehar, who wrote, “[T]he blame begins with none other than Kamala Harris. I can think of no more brutally honest way to describe her entire political life than as a fundamental error with historical consequences. … A politician like Harris should never have existed in a just world.”
Blehar continued, “She should never have even been in a position to run for the presidency. She was and remains a mindless cipher whose sole previous success had come from a lifetime spent slavishly slicking and shucking her way up the greasy pole of California politics: a land where merit and intellect matter vastly less than do demographic profile, looks, and availability.”
Harris’s single concern was abortion. She warned voters that, once in power, Trump would push for a national abortion ban. She alone would save them from such an injustice. Did it ever dawn on Harris that women buy groceries and gasoline far more often than they have abortions? They worry about crime. Some even have daughters who are being forced to compete against biological men in sports.
She repeatedly said, without evidence, that Trump was a fascist who posed a threat to our democracy. If reelected, Harris said, he would shred the Constitution and even use the criminal justice system against his enemies. Crazy, huh?
Inexplicably, although she’s been part of the current administration for nearly four years, she tried to present herself as the “new way forward.” Voters saw that as disingenuous.
In the end, she had nothing of substance to offer them.
So, please spare us your “peaceful transfer of power” malarkey and virtue signaling and just go away.
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Elizabeth Stauffer is a contributor to the Washington Examiner and the Western Journal. Follow her on X or LinkedIn.