Hundreds of supporters await the election results and for the arrival of Vice President Kamala Harris at The Yard at Howard University in Washington, D.C., on Nov. 5, 2024.
A supporter reacts to early election results at Democratic presidential nominee U.S. Vice President Kamala Harris' election night rally during the 2024 U.S. presidential election, at Howard University, in Washington, U.S., Nov. 5, 2024.
Hundreds of supporters await the election results and for the arrival of Vice President Kamala Harris at The Yard at Howard University in Washington, D.C., on Nov. 5, 2024.
Vice President Kamala Harris plans to address supporters at 4 p.m. Wednesday after calling President-elect Donald Trump to concede the election to him, people familiar with her plans said.
Harris will address the nation from her alma mater, Howard University. She has not made a public appearance since Trump won the presidential race early Wednesday morning. As vice president, Harris will continue to work in Washington on Wednesday, according to her official schedule.
Harris intended to call Trump ahead of her speech, according to the people, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss plans that weren’t public.
Her venue Wednesday underscores a stark contrast between her campaign and Trump’s campaign: She will give her speech from the campus of a historically Black university after conceding the race to an opponent with a history of invoking racist tropes and using dehumanizing language against non-White immigrants. During the campaign, Trump spread the racist falsehood that Haitians eat pets and called Harris “low-IQ,” an insult many considered to be a racial allusion.
The vice president became the second woman to run for president as a major-party candidate, and the second to lose the presidency to Trump. Harris’s loss was the end to an unexpected, whirlwind campaign in which she replaced President Joe Biden as the Democrats’ choice in July. Trump’s sweep of battleground states marks a crushing defeat for Harris after a close and hard-fought campaign.
Early Wednesday morning, as Harris’s paths to victory narrowed, she sent out her campaign co-chair, Cedric L. Richmond, to her party. Richmond told supporters there were still votes to be counted and said Harris would address them later in the day.
A supporter reacts to early election results at Democratic presidential nominee U.S. Vice President Kamala Harris' election night rally during the 2024 U.S. presidential election, at Howard University, in Washington, U.S., Nov. 5, 2024.
Daniel Cole/Reuters
Trump never conceded the 2020 election to President Joe Biden, instead falsely maintaining that the election was rigged. Harris has criticized Trump for denying the 2020 results, and it would have been a great surprise to many election watchers if Harris had refused to concede.
“All Americans are bound, whether we like the outcome or not, to accept the results of our elections,” one of Harris’s supporters, former Republican congresswoman Liz Cheney (Wyoming), asserted on social media Wednesday.
In 2016, then-nominee Hillary Clinton planned to hold her victory party in a building that featured a glass ceiling. Instead, she gave a concession speech at a New York hotel the morning after the election, after calling Trump privately on election night.
In her role as vice president, Harris will oversee the certification of Trump’s win by Congress in January, meaning she will preside over the certification of her own loss. Former vice president Al Gore did the same thing in 2000. The certification process will take months, as states certify results and electors meet to cast their votes for the candidate who won their state’s popular vote. Most states have laws preventing electors from voting for the candidate who lost their state.
Congress certifies all states’ votes Jan. 6, and Trump will be sworn in Jan. 20.
