‘Sometimes the fight takes a while’: Kamala Harris concedes the election to Donald Trump, but refuses to give up the fight

WASHINGTON—Kamala Harris conceded before the setting sun at Howard University Wednesday afternoon. She took the stage just after 4:20 p.m., accompanied one last time by her official campaign song.
“Freedom, freedom, I can’t move,” Beyoncé sang as Harris walked purposefully toward the podium where she had planned to give her acceptance speech Tuesday night.
All around her, in the crowd, campaign volunteers and staffers openly sobbed. They hugged and pushed up sunglasses to wipe away tears.
“Freedom, where are you?”
There will be time enough in the coming days to wonder what Donald Trump will mean, what he will do, diminished and unleashed, with four more years as president of the U.S.A. 
On Wednesday, at Howard — the historically Black university Harris attended after moving back to the U.S. from Montreal in her teens — supporters of her brief, surprising and ultimately doomed run for president weren’t quite ready to stop thinking about what might have been.
For hours, they trickled in, shellshocked and heartbroken. “I have hated every minute of this experience,” one woman said, half laughing, to a colleague as they embraced before Harris appeared.
The crowd was smaller than it had been the night before, and much more subdued. There were no party dresses, no drum lines, no dancing. Instead, there was only an endless parade of the longest, saddest hugs you’ve ever seen.
Harris, in her speech, tried to console her team. “To the young people who are watching” — she was interrupted then by cheers from the Howard students peppered through the crowd. “To the young people who are watching,” she started again, “it is okay to feel sad and disappointed, but please know it’s going to be okay.”
For a brief moment, Harris seemed to offer a glimpse of who she might have been in a different kind of campaign, a campaign that was more open and less scripted, that put her in more interviews with more reporters and made a better, broader pitch to more voters —that offered more reasons to vote for Kamala Harris, in other words, and not just against Donald Trump.
“On the campaign, I would often say, when we fight, we win,” she went on Wednesday. “But here’s the thing —” the crowd interrupted her again with their cheers. “Here’s the thing: Sometimes the fight takes a while. That doesn’t mean we won’t win.
Harris paused then, then repeated herself, punctuating each word. “That doesn’t mean we won’t win.”
Of course, the fact remains she didn’t win. In U.S. political terms, she didn’t even come close.  Harris either lost or was on track to lose every significant swing state Tuesday, including the entire so-called Blue Wall of Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin.
She lost so badly, in fact, that she was able to concede the race much earlier than most pundits, many of whom expected the contest to drag on for days, and possibly even months, predicted. The scope and speed of her defeat even allowed her to offer a kind of backhanded congratulations to Trump, one that served to both accept her own loss and remind the world that her opponent, four years earlier, had refused to accept his.
“Earlier today, I spoke with president-elect Trump and congratulated him on his victory,” Harris told the crowd. “I also told him that we will help him and his team with their transition, and that we will engage in a peaceful transfer of power.”  She again punctuated the last four words, pounding each one home. “Peaceful. Transfer. Of. Power.” And the crowd cheered again.
“While I concede this election,” she added, “I do not concede the fight that fuelled this campaign.”
Harris spoke for just over 10 minutes. When she was finished, she thanked the crowd. For a moment then, just half a second on screen, she seemed to allow her own disappointment to show. “I thank you all,” she said, then clasped her hands and pursed her lips. “I thank you.” Then she turned around and walked off stage.
In her speech, Harris only alluded once to the historic nature of her own campaign. Had she won Tuesday she would have been first female president of the United States, as well as the first U.S. president of either Jamaican or Indian descent.  It was an oblique reference. It cast the fight forward. It was also the most impassioned Harris sounded all day.
“Don’t ever give up,” she said, addressing the young people in the crowd. “Don’t ever give up. Don’t ever stop trying to make the world a better place. You have power. You have power. And don’t you ever listen when anyone tells you something is impossible because it has never been done before.”