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Republican vice-presidential candidate JD Vance refused five times to say if he believes former President Donald Trump lost the 2020 election during part of an hour-long interview with The New York Times.
“Do you believe he lost the 2020 election?” host of “The Interview,” Lulu Garcia-Navarro said.
“I think that Donald Trump and I have both raised a number of issues with the 2020 election, but we’re focused on the future,” Vance said. “I think there’s an obsession here with focusing on 2020. I’m much more worried about what happened after 2020, which is a wide-open border, groceries that are unaffordable, and look—”
“Senator, yes or no: Did Donald Trump lose the 2020 election,” Garcia-Navarro pressed.
“Let me ask you a question. Is it OK that big technology companies censored the Hunter Biden laptop story, which independent analysts have said cost Trump millions of votes?” Vance said.
“Senator Vance, I’m going to ask you again,” Garcia-Navarro said. “Did Donald Trump lose the 2020 election?”
“Did big technology companies censor a story that independent studies have suggested cost Trump millions of votes? I think that’s the question,” Vance replied.
Asked again, Vance said, “You answer my question, and I’ll answer yours.”
Pressed again, Vance said Garcia-Navarro was “repeating a slogan rather than engaging with what I’m saying.”
“When our own technology firms engage in industrial scale censorship, by the way, backed up by the federal government in a way that independent studies suggest affect the votes, I’m worried about Americans who feel like there were problems in 2020. I’m not worried about the slogan that people throw, ‘Well every court case went this way.’ I’m talking about something very discrete: A problem of censorship in this country that I do think affected things in 2020, and more importantly, that led to Kamala Harris’ governance,” Vance said.
It was a very similar answer to one he gave during his debate last week with Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz, when Vance deflected a direct question on whether Trump lost in the last election – a dodge that Walz referred to as a “damning nonanswer.” Democrats have criticized Vance’s refusal to directly say that Trump lost in 2020, arguing that he would enable the former president’s worst impulses.
“Donald Trump chose JD Vance to be his running mate for one reason and one reason only: He will do what Mike Pence wouldn’t and put Donald Trump over our Constitution,” Harris campaign spokesperson Sarafina Chitika said in a statement. “Vance is the Project 2025 enabler of Trump’s dreams, and his refusal to acknowledge the simple fact that Donald Trump lost the 2020 election is proof that if Trump wins, there will be no one left to check his worst instincts and stop him from gaining unprecedented, unchecked power to do whatever he wants and put our country at risk.”
CNN’s KFile reported Monday that, in the weeks after the 2020 election, Vance indicated he believed that Trump had lost the election and accepted that Joe Biden would be inaugurated.
But in the clip released on Friday, Vance stood by his stance of saying he would have asked the states to submit alternate electors if he were Trump’s vice president in 2020.
“I’ve said that I would’ve voted against certification, because of the concern that I just raised,” Vance said, claiming that technology companies are “censoring Americans at a mass scale.”
Asked if he would support the election results and commit to a peaceful transfer of power, Vance said, “Of course, we commit to a peaceful transfer of power.”
On the 2024 election results, Vance hedged, but said they would “respect the results.”
“But, if there are problems, of course, in the same way that Democrats protested in 2004 and Donald Trump raised issues in 2020, we’re going to make sure that this election counts. That every legal ballot is counted. We’ve filed almost a hundred lawsuits at the RNC to try to ensure that every legal ballot has counted,” he said.
Although a handful of congressional Democrats objected to the 2004 results, unlike Trump, then-Democratic Sen. John Kerry conceded the race to President George W. Bush the morning after Election Night after it became clear that a close race in the deciding state of Ohio would go in the incumbent’s favor. While Trump has occasionally made some allusions to not winning in 2020, he never formally conceded the race to Biden.
On the RNC’s efforts, Vance said to Garcia-Navarro, “I think you would maybe criticize that. We see that as an important effort to ensure election integrity, but certainly we’re going to respect the results in 2024, and I feel very confident they’re going to make Donald Trump the next president.”
