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Finally, Vance more or less answers the question about the 2020 race

Monicel
Finally, Vance more or less answers the question about the 2020 race

Two weeks later, it remains the most memorable moment of the vice presidential debate. Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz asked Ohio Sen. JD Vance, “Did (Trump) lose the 2020 election?” The Republican declined to answer.

In the days that followed, the GOP vice presidential nominee faced the same question again and again. In each case, Vance simply did not say whether his running mate won or lost, and in the process, the senator failed to acknowledge the legitimacy of the last US presidential election.

In one particularly memorable exchange, The New York Times asked Vance five times if Trump lost the 2020 race. Five times, Vance refused to answer, justifying his reluctance in a completely absurd way.

That was last week. This week, as NBC News reported, there was a breakthrough of sorts.

In his most direct response to the 2020 election results yet since joining the Republican presidential ticket, Sen. JD Vance of Ohio appeared to say Wednesday that he doesn’t think Donald Trump lost the last presidential election. Asked by reporters after speaking at a rally in central Pennsylvania, Vance was pressed about recent appearances in which he has refused to directly say whether or not Trump lost his re-election bid against Joe Biden .

“I’ve answered that question directly a million times,” the GOP nominee said. “No. I think there are serious problems in 2020. So did Donald Trump lose the election? Not because of the words I would use.”

Vance probably used the most unnecessarily clumsy phrasing possible: how a best-selling author arrived at “not because of the words I’d use” I’ll never know, perhaps hoping that the indirect word choice would make him seem and sound less an electoral denier.

But that won’t work. The GOP candidate is an election denier.

The facts are unequivocal. Vance saw the results of a free and fair election; saw the results of dozens of lawsuits; saw Trump fail spectacularly for nearly four years to produce even a modicum of evidence; and saw key figures around Trump: his campaign manager, campaign data team, campaign lawyers, independent researchers, etc. — OK the 2020 GOP ticket really did lose, fair enough.

And it is in this context that the candidate of the Republican Party for the second office of the nation, after dodging direct questions for two weeks, has nevertheless decided to reject the legitimacy of an electoral result decided by the electorate of his own country .

There is no defense for such an open rejection of democracy. Democrats have spent much of the 2024 race arguing that both members of the Republican ticket are hostile to the American political system and the rule of law. Vance has now taken new steps to prove them right.

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