The peaceful transfer of power is back, America.

During her concession speech at Howard University Wednesday afternoon, Vice President Kamala Harris brought back from the dead one of America’s most storied traditions: presidential candidates accepting the results of electoral defeat, urging their supporters to do the same and pledging to work with the upcoming elections. administration.

“Now I know that people are feeling and experiencing a range of emotions right now,” Harris said. “I understand, but we have to accept the results of this election. Earlier today I spoke with President-elect Trump and congratulated him on his victory. I also told him that we will assist him and his team in their transition, and that we will achieve a peaceful transition of power.”

The mention of “President-elect Trump” prompted a brief boos, which the vice president ignored. But the words “peaceful transfer of power” sparked cheers from her dejected supporters. That matters a lot.

Whatever you think about a second Trump presidency, Harris’ words are critical to the health of American democracy. To varying degrees, 2024 will be the first widely accepted presidential election since George HW Bush decisively defeated Michael Dukakis in 1988.

A loud and prominent group of Republicans never accepted the legitimacy of either of Bill Clinton’s elections because he never won an outright majority in the popular vote, especially since third-party candidate Ross Perot in 1992 won about 18.9% and 8.4% of the obtained votes. and 1996.

Then came 2000, when George W. Bush lost the popular vote but won the Electoral College after the Supreme Court halted Florida’s recount, with Bush leading by 537 votes. Many Democrats never accepted Bush’s legitimacy afterward, even when he won reelection in 2004, when a small group of Democrats insisted that some vote-counting handkerchief in Ohio had wrongly swung the Buckeye State to Bush.

Barack Obama was elected in a popular and electoral landslide in 2008 and then handily re-elected in 2012. But a false conspiracy theory claiming that Obama was born abroad — a racist lie most prominently amplified by Trump — led millions of Americans to highlight Obama’s two decisive victories. were in fact unconstitutional.

Then there was 2016, when Hillary Clinton lost a seemingly unlosable election to political novice Trump, amid evidence of Russian election interference. Many overwrought Democrats refused to accept the glaring failures of their nominee’s campaign and instead overhyped the very real and nefarious connections of Trump and Vladimir Putin into a fantasy of Trump as a puppet of a “Manchurian candidate.”

But in all those elections the defeated opponent gave in. And, with the exception of Al Gore in 2000, they quickly relented. (Gore’s final concession after the Supreme Court ruling, however, elegantly accepted the legitimacy of the Bush presidency and called for unity among Americans.)

Only in 2020, when Trump lost a close election – but decisively – was the 220-year-old tradition of peaceful transfer of power broken. And it was broken for no good reason.

Trump spread lies about election fraud that were so baseless that they were rejected by state Republican Party officials, his own attorney general, his daughter Ivanka, and by a Supreme Court with a 6-3 conservative majority (including three Trump appointees). . He will now most likely escape prosecution for his efforts to overturn the 2020 election and inciting the January 6, 2021 attack on the US Capitol (and for illegally hoarding national security documents).

In Harris’s case, after running a campaign that rightly made an issue of the uniquely destructive force Trump has exerted on American politics — including testimony from his own former cabinet members that he is an out-of-control fascist — the vice president accepted the will of the people. Just as defeated Senator John McCain did in 2008 when he told his supporters that the failure was his, not theirs, and called Obama “my president,” Harris made it clear that Trump will be her president — just as he has for more will then be a year. 300 million Americans.

The fact that the words “peaceful transfer of power” drew applause from Harris’ supporters at Howard says something important about the state of America right now. A defeated Trump would never say these words; we know this because he did not know it when he was defeated. And his supporters would never applaud such a line because Trump convinced them of the big lie that “they” stole the 2020 election.

Someone had to make a gesture that the rhetorical war called elections is now over. The loser has conceded, for the sake of the country, even if the winner never would.