It Seems That America Will See a Peaceful Transfer of Power, after All
In an address last Wednesday evening, Vice President Kamala Harris conceded the 2024 presidential race to former President Donald Trump. “A fundamental principle of American democracy is that when we lose an election, we accept the results,” she said. At her concession, Americans breathed a collective sigh of relief. Only a week earlier, a Scripps News/Ipsos poll found that over 60% of respondents expected post-election violence, no matter who won.
With nearly all the votes counted, Trump has secured a sizable Electoral College victory. (He will also win an outright majority of votes nationwide, but that is not how American presidents are chosen.) The election is over and decided, yet despite some pop-up protests, the widely expected violence has not materialized. That makes America’s constitutional order stronger.
There will be various, not-always-compatible explanations for the lack of violence. Democratic partisans will implausibly charge that the only threat of violence was from Trump’s goons, who got the outcome they were hoping for. The MAGA crowd will fire back with the illogical rhyme that Trump’s victory was “too big to rig.” (If Democrats were determined to steal an election, would the number of ballots needed stop them?)
There’s probably an element of truth in both claims. There likely are committed activists on both sides who, given the right circumstances, would take to the streets in favor of their preferred candidate. The Scripps News/Ipsos survey found that 77% of Republicans and 85% of Democrats would accept the results of the election if their candidate lost, which means nearly a quarter of partisans would not.
For now, the result is so far beyond dispute that any extra-democratic demonstrations are pointless, for either side. This seems to be a more important factor. Even if there were irregularities to adjudicate, Trump’s margins of victories (110,000 votes in Georgia, 130,000 votes in Pennsylvania, 140,000 in Arizona) are simply too large to overcome. Consequently, partisan activists are either elated with the outcome or too depressed to make a scene.
As part of placing the election “beyond dispute,” it’s also worth observing that the actual conduct of the 2024 election appears to be much cleaner than that of the 2020 election. One reason why there have been far fewer electoral irregularities is likely that this election was not conducted under the looming cloud of COVID-19, which means far fewer justifications for last-minute accommodations and a decided reduction in the use of mail-in ballots.
Another important reason is the relentless focus on election integrity over the past four years. Some states passed laws to establish better safeguards. Some states cleaned up the voter rolls to remove noncitizens, deceased people, and former voters who moved out-of-state. Perhaps most importantly, a vigilant Republican Party assembled an army of election lawyers, which they deployed to counteract any shenanigans that did take place, before they could do any serious harm.
With the election outcome beyond reasonable dispute, Harris chose the honorable response — the one that reinforced America’s democratic institutions. “While I concede this election, I do not concede the fight that fueled this campaign … a fight for the ideals at the heart of our nation, the ideals that reflect America at our best. That is a fight I will never give up,” she declared. “This is not a time to throw up our hands. This is a time to roll up our sleeves. This is a time to organize, to mobilize, and to stay engaged for the sake of freedom, and justice, and the future that we all know we can build together.”
While strident in tone, Harris’s comments did pay homage to America’s tradition of peacefully transferring power. She didn’t have to endorse Trump or agree with his agenda to acknowledge his victory. In fact, she disagreed so strongly with Trump that she repeated thinly sourced news reports comparing him to Hitler only a week before the election.
How could Harris, the sitting vice president, peacefully cede power to a man she compared to one of the worst dictators of the last century? Harris is relying on America’s constitutional system of regularly scheduled elections. The Democratic Party will have another opportunity to retake control of Congress in 2026, and another opportunity to retake control of the White House in 2028.
Of course, this concession implies that campaign rhetoric declaring that Trump presented a Hitlerian threat to America’s constitutional order was nothing more than that: campaign rhetoric. America’s constitutional order is stronger than the ambitions or vices of any one man or woman.
One virtue of the American system is that it makes the option of persuasion available to everyone, so no one has to turn to force. For decades, American voters have routinely given power first to one party, then to the other, and often to both parties at the same time. So, instead of spending their energies weakening American institutions and squandering civic trust through forceful resistance, Harris and her fellow Democrats can channel those energies into productive activities such as trying to persuade the American public that their ideas are better.
Will Harris’s fellow Democrats take this option? Will university radicals stop occupying buildings on their campuses? Will anti-police protestors turn to persuasion instead of obstruction to obtain their ends? Will Antifa-style activists spare American cities from four more years of vandalism, semi-random violence, and the occasional Molotov cocktail? Past experience gives little reason for optimism on this front. There may yet be sporadic but stupid protests on Inauguration Day. At the very least, Harris has finally put some daylight between herself and the radicals, which she was never able to do on the campaign trail.
Also on Wednesday, the fragile figure behind the Resolute Desk reinforced his successor’s decision to embrace honor in defeat. President Joe Biden congratulated Trump on his victory and directed “my entire administration to work with his team to ensure a peaceful and orderly transition,” he told the nation.
“Campaigns are contests of competing visions,” said Biden. “The country chooses one or the other. We accept the choice the country made. I’ve said many times you can’t love your country only when you win.” (By the democracy lessons they uttered in their concessions, both Biden and Harris are not-so-subtly trying to draw a contrast with Trump’s conduct in 2020 — a note of self-interest in their otherwise gracious concessions.)
“I also hope we can lay to rest the question about the integrity of the American electoral system,” Biden added. “It is honest, it is fair, and it is transparent. And it can be trusted, win or lose.” This is not quite the lesson to draw from the 2024 election because it conflates different issues. The American electoral system does not gain integrity if we simply silence or shame those asking questions. Rather, the lesson from the 2024 election is that working vigilantly to safeguard election integrity produces a result everyone can trust.
In any event, the longstanding tradition of America’s peaceful transfer of power continues yet again. Even after a bitterly fought, no-holds-barred campaign, one party will surrender the Oval Office to the other party, in hopes of returning to power four years later through the same, legitimate means — the ballot box. This is the American political tradition, and we can all celebrate the fact that it continues a little longer.
Joshua Arnold is a senior writer at The Washington Stand.