Harris Repeats False Claim About 2024 Election Following Blow-Out Loss to Trump

Former Vice President Kamala Harris once again misrepresented the results of the 2024 presidential election during a weekend stop on her national book tour — this time standing up mid-event and shouting that President Donald J. Trump “does not have a mandate.”

Harris made the remarks Saturday at Houston’s Hobby Center for Performing Arts, a 2,650-seat venue, while promoting her new memoir 107 Days, which recounts her failed 2024 campaign against President Trump.

“Here’s the other thing that is quite unprecedented — and it was the tightest, closest presidential election in the 21st Century,” Harris declared, before leaping to her feet. “He does not have a mandate! That is not a mandate! That is not a mandate!”

The outburst drew cheers from the mostly liberal crowd, with one attendee shouting, “And he never did!” Harris then laughed and joked that her moderator, activist Carlos Eduardo Espina, had gotten so fired up that “he stood up too.”

But Harris’s claim is factually false.

By every objective metric, the 2024 election was not the closest race of the century. President Trump won decisively — 312 to 226 in the Electoral College — marking the largest margin since 2012. In the popular vote, the Trump-Harris gap was wider than that of Hillary Clinton’s loss to Trump in 2016. And by the “tipping point” metric — which calculates the minimal shift in votes required to change the outcome — Harris’s defeat trailed behind the performances of John Kerry in 2004, Clinton in 2016, and Trump himself in 2020.

Still, Harris continues to repeat the false narrative on her tour, including during appearances at Howard University on Sept. 27 and on MSNBC last month.

The former vice president also used her Houston event to lament her campaign’s end, saying she missed the “optimism, enthusiasm, and dare I say, joy” it generated. She encouraged supporters to “carry the light” within them — a comment many observers saw as an attempt to reframe her defeat as a moral victory.

Despite her lofty rhetoric, Harris’s campaign collapse remains one of the most dramatic in modern history. She began the race with over $1.5 billion in campaign funds, a solid base of establishment donors, and near-universal support from the corporate media. Yet she failed to win any major swing states — including Pennsylvania, Georgia, Arizona, and Wisconsin — and even lost the national popular vote, the first Democrat to do so in over twenty years.

Her forthcoming book also paints an unflattering picture of internal Democratic Party dysfunction. Harris reportedly recounts how California Governor Gavin Newsom refused to endorse her, replying to her outreach with a terse “I’m hiking” text message before cutting off communication entirely.

She writes that she considered former Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg as a potential running mate but ultimately concluded the country was “not ready” for a gay vice-presidential nominee. Harris instead selected Minnesota Governor Tim Walz — a decision she describes with mixed feelings, calling the pairing “a compromise born of necessity.”

The former vice president also admits she believed it was “reckless” for Joe Biden to run for reelection in 2024, though she publicly defended his candidacy to “maintain unity.”

In a September 22 interview with MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow, Harris was asked whether she planned to run again for president.

“That’s not my focus right now. That’s not my focus at all. It really isn’t,” she replied.

While Harris insists she’s moving on, her fiery rhetoric on the tour circuit suggests otherwise — and her refusal to accept the reality of President Trump’s clear second-term victory has many conservatives seeing shades of the same election denialism Democrats once claimed to abhor.