Kamala Harris finally called Donald Trump on Wednesday afternoon to concede the election, hours after the race was called and his devastating defeat was confirmed.
But he had a warning for the president-elect, lecturing him even as he congratulated him.
“He spoke about the importance of a peaceful transfer of power and being a president for all Americans,” a senior Harris adviser said.
Harris, during her campaign, repeatedly promised to be a president “for all Americans.”
She will grant the nation aAt Howard University later today, nearly 12 hours after the election was called for his Republican rival. Trump spends the day at his Mar-a-Lago home.
Kamala Harris formally conceded the election to Donald Trump
Their phone call came shortly after Michigan was called to elect the president-elect, making it the third state in the “blue wall” of states that would decide the election.
Trump now has 292 electoral votes to Harris’ 224. It takes 270 to win the presidency.
The Democrats were counting on that “blue wall” to give Harris the White House. But Trump won three states: Michigan, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania.
Joe Biden won all three in 2020, but Harris couldn’t keep them in the Democrats’ corner.
Trump is the first president in more than 130 years – and just the second in history – to win a second non-consecutive term.
Exit polls show his victory came after he made gains in nearly every electoral bloc he lost in the 2020 election and built a coalition of multi-ethnic working-class voters.
And Harris fared worse Tuesday than Biden in the 2020 race among key voter groups, including women, the working class and Latinos.
That’s what the exit poll numbers show.
But the election results also come down to this: Trump had a vision for America, while Harris had a word salad, voters trusted him more to fix the economy, and the American people thought Biden had put the country in the race. Wrong way.
It all added up to Donald Trump overcoming a criminal conviction, accusations and an assassin’s bullet to return to the White House.
Donald Trump with his wife Melania and son Barron on election night
And Trump did it overwhelmingly. The election that was predicted to be nail-biting was instead a red tsunami.
Trump not only won the electoral college but also the popular vote, earning 71.2 million votes to Harris’ 66.4 million. Tellingly, Harris got fewer overall votes than Biden in 2020. That year, her ticket got 81 million votes.
The popular vote is still being counted, but Trump could be the first Republican president since George W. Bush to win it.