Read Kamala Harris' full concession speech, Donald Trump's victory address

Faced with a sweeping rejection by American voters, Kamala Harris conceded the presidential election to Donald Trump on Wednesday and encouraged supporters to continue fighting for their vision of the country.

The Democratic vice president said the battle would continue “in the voting booth, in the courts and in the public square.”

Her address came hours after she called Trump to congratulate him and after Trump told the audience at his election night party early on Wednesday that it was “time to unite” as a country.

Harris’ decisive defeat shattered hopes that she could rescue Democrats’ chances after President Joe Biden’s reelection effort stalled and she replaced him at the top of the ticket.

She trailed in every battleground state to Trump, a Republican whom she described as an existential danger to the country’s foundational institutions. And Trump appeared on track to win the popular vote for the first time in his three campaigns for the White House — even after two impeachments, felony convictions and his attempt to overturn his previous election loss.

Read the addresses from both candidates in the hours after the call was made:

Harris Speech

So let me say my heart is full today. My heart is full today. Full of gratitude for the trust you have placed in me. Full of love for our country and full of resolve.

The outcome of this election is not what we wanted, not what we fought for, not what we voted for, but hear me when I say – hear me when I say the light of America’s promise will always burn bright as long as we never give up and as long as we keep fighting.

To my beloved Doug and our family, I love you so very much. To President Biden and Dr. Biden, thank you for your faith and support. To Governor Walz and the Walz family, I know your service to our nation will continue. And to my extraordinary team, to the volunteers who gave so much of themselves, to the poll workers and the local election officials, I thank you. I thank you all.

Look, I am so proud of the race we ran and the way we ran it – and the way we ran it. Over the 107 days of this campaign, we have been intentional about building community and building coalitions, bringing people together from every walk of life and background, united by love of country with enthusiasm and joy in our fight for America’s future. And we did it with the knowledge that we all have so much more in common than what separates us.

Now I know folks are feeling and experiencing a range of emotions right now. I get it. But we must 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 help him and his team with their transition and that we will engage in a peaceful transfer of power. A fundamental principle of American democracy is that when we lose an election, we accept the results. That principle, as much as any other, distinguishes democracy from monarchy or tyranny and anyone who seeks the public trust must honor it. At the same time in our nation, we owe loyalty not to a president or a party but to the Constitution of the United States and loyalty to our conscience and to our God. My allegiance to all three is why I am here to say while I concede this election, I do not concede the fight that fueled this campaign. The fight for freedom, for opportunity, for fairness and the dignity of all people. A fight for the ideals at the heart of our nation, the ideals that reflect America at our best. That is a fight. I will never give up. I will never give up the fight for a future where Americans can pursue their dreams, ambitions and aspirations. Where the women of America have the freedom to make decisions about their own body without a government telling them what to do.

We will never give up the fight to protect our schools and our streets from gun violence. And America, we will never give up the fight for our democracy, for the rule of law for equal justice and for the sacred idea that every one of us, no matter who we are or where we start out, has certain fundamental rights and freedoms that must be respected and upheld.

And we will continue to wage this fight in the voting booth, in the courts and in the public square. And we will also wage it in quieter ways in how we live our lives, by treating one another with kindness and respect. By looking in the face of a stranger and seeing a neighbor. By always using our strength to lift people up, to fight for the dignity that all people deserve. The fight for our freedom will take hard work, but like I always say, we like hard work. Hard work is good work, hard work can be joyful work and the fight for our country is always worth it. It is always worth it.

To the young people who are watching, it is okay to feel sad and disappointed, but please know it’s gonna be okay. On the campaign I would often say, when we fight we win. But here’s the thing.

Here’s the thing. Sometimes the fight takes a while. That doesn’t mean we won’t win. That doesn’t mean we won’t win. The important thing is don’t ever give up. 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. You have the capacity to do extraordinary good in the world and so to everyone who is watching: Do not despair. This is not a time to throw up our hands.

This is a time to roll up our sleeves. This is a time to organize to mobilize and to stay engaged. For the sake of freedom and justice and the future that we all know we can build together.

Look, many of you know I started out as a prosecutor and throughout my career I saw people at some of the worst times in their lives people who had suffered great harm and great pain and yet found within themselves the strength and the courage and the resolve to take the stand, to take a stand, to fight for justice, to fight for themselves, to fight for others.

So let their courage be our inspiration. Let their determination be our charge.

And I’ll close with this: there’s an adage an historian once called a law of history true of every society across the ages the adage is…

Only when it is dark enough can you see the stars.

I know many people feel like we are entering a dark time, but for the benefit of us all I hope that is not the case. But here’s the thing America: if it is, let us fill the sky with the light of a brilliant, brilliant billions of stars. The light of optimism, of faith, of truth and service.

And may that work guide us even in the face of setbacks toward the extraordinary promise of The United States of America.

I thank you all. May God bless you and may God bless the United States of America.

Trump Speech

Thank you very much. Wow. Well, I want to thank you all very much. This is great. These are our friends. We have thousands of friends in this incredible movement. This is a movement like nobody’s ever seen before. And frankly, this was, I believe, the greatest political movement of all time. There’s never been anything like this in this country and maybe beyond. And now it’s going to reach a new level of importance because we’re going to help our country heal.

We’re going to help our country here. We have a country that needs help and it needs help very badly. We’re going to fix our borders. We’re going to fix everything about our country. And we made history for a reason tonight. And the reason is going to be just that we overcame obstacles that nobody thought possible. And it is now clear that we’ve achieved the most incredible political … Look, what happened. Is this crazy? But it’s a political victory that our country has never seen before. Nothing like this.

I want to thank the American people for the extraordinary honor of being elected, your 47th president and your 45th president…

I will fight for you, for your family and your future. Every single day I will be fighting for you. And with every breath in my body, I will not rest until we have delivered the strong, safe and prosper America that our children deserve and that you deserve. This will truly be the golden age of America. That’s what we have been.

This is a magnificent victory for the American people that will allow us to make America great again. And in addition to having won the battleground states of North Carolina – I love these places – Georgia, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin, we are now winning in Michigan, Arizona, Nevada and Alaska, which would result in us carrying at least 315 electoral votes. But that but as much as you’re doing what the networks did or whoever called it, because there was no other path, there was no other path to victory.

We also have won the popular vote. That was great. Thank you. Thank you very much. Winning the popular vote was very nice. Very nice.

I will tell you, it’s a great feeling of love. We have a great feeling of love in this very large room with unbelievable people standing by my side. These people have been incredible. They’ve made the journey with me and we’re going to make you very happy. We’re going to make you very proud of your vote.

I hope that you’re going to be looking back some day and say that was one of the truly important moments of my life when I voted for this group of people beyond the president, this group of great people. And America has given us an unprecedented and powerful mandate.

We have taken back control of the Senate. Wow, that’s great. And the Senate races in Montana, Nevada, Texas, Ohio, Michigan, Wisconsin, the great Commonwealth of Pennsylvania were all won by the MAGA movement. They helped so much and in those cases, every one of them. We worked with the senators. They were tough races and I mean the number of victories in the Senate was absolutely incredible. And we did tele-rallies. We did tele-rallies with each one of them. And sometimes we did two or three, four. And it was amazing to look at all of those victories. Nobody expected that. Nobody.

So I just wanted to thank you very much for that. And we have you have some great senators and some great new senators. And it also looks like we’ll be keeping control of the House of Representatives. And I want to thank Mike Johnson. I think he’s doing a terrific job. Terrific job.

I want to also thank my beautiful wife, Melania and first Lady for who has the number one bestselling book in the country. Can you believe? Now, she has done a great job, works very hard, works very hard to help people. So I just want to thank her, but I want to thank my whole family, my amazing children. And they are amazing children. Now. We all think our children, everybody is. Exactly, children are amazing. But that’s a good thing when you think they are. But Don, Eric, Ivanka, Barron, Lara, Jared, Kimberly, Michael thank you all. What a help.

Wow what a great. My father-in-law Victor is tremendous and we miss very much Melania’s mother, Amalija. We miss Amalija … How she would be very happy right now, standing on this stage, she’d be so proud. She was a great woman that one. Beautiful inside and out. She was a great woman.

I want to be the first to congratulate our great, now I can say, vice president-elect of the United States and his absolutely remarkable and beautiful wife. JD Vance. And he is a feisty guy, isn’t he? You know, I’ve said, ‘Go into the enemy camp and, you know, the enemy camp is certain networks and a lot of people don’t like to … ‘Do I have to do that?’ He just goes, ‘OK, which one?’ CNN, MSNBC. He’ll say, ‘All right, thank you very much.’ He actually looks like he’s like the only guy I’ve ever seen he really looks forward to it. And then he just goes and absolutely obliterates there.

[Vance speaks]

Thank you very much. He’s turned out to be a good choice. I took a little heat at the beginning, but he was, I knew the brain was a good one, about as good as it gets. And we love the family and we’re going to have a great four years and we’re going to turn our country around, making something very special. Lost that little thing called special.

We have to make it so we’re going to make this so great. It’s going to. It’s the greatest country and potentially the greatest country in the world by far. And right now, we’re going to just work very hard to get all of that back. We’re going to make it the best it’s ever been. We can do that. We just, if we had to wait longer, I don’t know. It was going bad and it was going bad fast.

We’re going to have to seal up those borders and we’re going to have to let people come into our country. We want people to come back in. But we have to we have to let them come back in, but they have to come in legally. They have to come in legally.

Let me also express my tremendous appreciation for Susie and Chris, the job you did … Let me tell you. The ice baby. We call it the ice. One of Chris. Come here. Come here.

[Trump campaign co-manager Chris LaCivita speaks]

Thank you. And thank you, sir. You’re going to see I’ve never seen you be shy before, Susie. They’ve been, they’ve been great. Everybody up here is great. Everybody up here is very special … Oh, let me tell you. We have a new star. A star is born. Elon.

Now he is. Now. He’s an amazing guy. We were sitting together tonight. You know, he spent two weeks in Philadelphia in different parts of Pennsylvania campaigning. You know, he set the rocket up two weeks ago. And I saw that rocket and I saw it coming down. I saw it. It was when it left. It was beautiful, shiny, white. When it came down, it didn’t look so pretty. It was going 10,000 miles an hour and is burning like hell. I said, ‘What happened to your paint job?’ He said, ‘We’ve never made a paint that could withstand that kind of heat.’ And but I saw it come down and turn around and it was, you know, it’s like 22 stories tall, by the way. It looks a little smaller than that, but it’s big. And it came down and down and you saw that fire burning and and I’m saying, only Elon can do this. It must be Elon.

And I tell the story. I told it last night. I had a man on the phone. I had the speaker muted, no sound. I was talking to a very important man, happens to be here. And that very important guy, one of the most important people in, I would say, the country, actually. But you know, I was president and now it looks like I was going to be maybe president again. So I figured I could ask him to hold. So I asked him to hold on because especially because you’re going to be president again … so I took the phone down and I’m looking at the screen. I’m seeing this crazy thing that’s going around and coming down and it looks like a jet’s crashing and I said, ‘Oh, no.’ And I said, ‘Do me a favor. Do you mind holding for a couple of minutes? I want to see this.’ I thought it was a space age movie or something. I put the phone down, but I didn’t pick it up for 45 minutes and it was holding.

But this spaceship came down and I saw those engines firing and it looked like it was over. It was going to smash. And then I saw the fire pour out from the left side and I put it straight and it came down so gently. And then it wrapped those arms around it and it held it. And just like you hold your baby at night, your little baby. And it was a beautiful thing to see. And I called Elon and said, ‘Elon, was that you?’ He said, ‘Yes, it was.’ I said, ‘Who else can do that?’ Can Russia do it? No. Can China do it? No. Can the United States do it other than, you know, nobody can do that. I said, ‘That’s why I love you, Elon.’

That’s great. And, you know, when we had the tragic Hurricane Helene and it hit particularly North Carolina, they were really devastated. The water. This was a big water, as big as we’ve ever seen. What a hurricane. They built lakes out of nothing. Fields became like sand and the danger was unbelievable. And the people from North Carolina came to me and they said, ‘Would it be possible at all possible for you to speak to Elon Musk? We need StarLink.’ I said, ‘What’s StarLink?’ It’s a form of communication. So I called Elon and I’ll tell you what he had, and it was very dangerous. People would die. They had no communication. All the wires were down. I called Elon Musk. I said, ‘Elon, you have something called StarLink, is that right?’ ‘Yes, I do.’ ‘What the hell is it?’ He said It’s a communication system that’s very good.’ I said, ‘Elon, they need it really, really badly in North Carolina. Can you get it here?’ Got it there so fast. It was incredible. So and it was great. It saved a lot of lives. He saved a lot of lives. But he’s a character. He’s a special guy. He’s a super genius. We have to protect our geniuses. We don’t have that many of them. We have to protect our super geniuses.

I want to thank… I think, you know, we have the US Open champion. He’s fantastic … Bryson DeChambeau is up here … Bryson. Oh, look at him. Oh he had a great, he’s got a great career going. Great U.S. Open Bryson. It’s a fantastic job. And we also have a man, Dana White, who has done some golf, is a tough guy. And so Dana started UFC and …and nobody’s done a better job in sports. And, you know, he’s a very motivational kind of a guy. What he does, he gets his fighters and they they really go at it. It has become one of the most successful sports enterprises anywhere at any time.

[Dana White speaks]

Now is that amazing? He’s really an amazing guy.

But most of all, I want to thank the millions of hardworking Americans across the nation who have always been the heart and soul of this really great movement. We’re going to pay you back. We’re going to do the best job. We’re going to be to turn it around.

Robert F. Kennedy Jr. And now he’s a great guy and he really means it. He wants to do some things and we’re going to let him go to it. I just said, ‘But Bobby, leave the oil to me. We have more liquid gold, oil and gas. We have more liquid gold than any country in the world, more than Saudi Arabia. We have more than Russia. Bobby, stay away from the liquid gold. Other than that, go have a good time, Bobby.’

We’re going to be paying down debt. We’re going to be reducing taxes. We have we can do things that nobody else can do. Nobody else is going to be able to do it. China doesn’t have what we have.

Nobody has what we have, but we have the greatest people also. Maybe that’s the most important thing. This campaign. This campaign has been so historic in so many ways. We’ve built the biggest, broadest, the most unified coalition. They’ve never seen anything like it in all of American history. They’ve never seen in their young and old men and women, rural and urban. And we had them all helping us tonight. When you think, I mean, I was looking at it, I was watching it. They had some great analysis of the people that voted for us. Nobody’s ever seen anything like that. They came from all corners – union, nonunion, African-American, Hispanic American, Asian American, Arab American, Muslim American – and we had everybody. And it was beautiful. It was a historic realignment, uniting citizens of all backgrounds around a common core of common sense.

You know, we’re the party of common sense. We want to have borders. We want to have security. We want to have things be good, safe. We want great education. We want a strong and powerful military. And ideally, we don’t have to use it. You know, we had no wars for years. We had no wars except we defeated ISIS. We defeated ISIS in record time, but we had no wars. They said he will start a war. I’m not going to start a war. I’m going to stop wars. But this is also a massive victory for democracy and for freedom. Together, we’re going to unlock America’s glorious destiny and we’re going to achieve the most incredible future for our people.

Yesterday, as I stood at my last stop on the campaign trail, I’ll never be doing a rally again. Can you believe it? I think we’ve done 900 rallies. Approximately. Can you imagine? 900? 901. Something. A lot of rallies. And it was sad. Everybody was sad. Many people have said this is our last rally, but now we’re going on to something that’s far more important because the rallies were used for us to put be put in this position where we can really help our country. That’s what we’re going to do. We’re going to make our country better than it ever has been. And I said that, many people have told me that God spared my life for a reason. And that reason was to save our country and to restore America to greatness. And now we are going to fulfill that mission together. We’re going to fulfill that mission.

The task before us will not be easy, but I will bring every ounce of energy, spirit and fight that I have in my soul to the job that you’ve entrusted to me. This is a great job. There’s no job like this. This is the most important job in the world, just as I did in my first term. We had a great first term.

A great, great first term. I will govern by a simple motto: promises made, promises kept. We’re going to keep our promise. Nothing will stop me from keeping my word to you, the people. We will make America safer, strong, prosperous, powerful and free again. And I’m asking every citizen all across our land to join me in this noble and righteous endeavor.

That’s what it is. It’s time to put the divisions of the past four years behind us. It’s time to unite. And we’re going to try. We’re going to try. We have to try and it’s going to happen. Success will bring us together. I’ve seen that. I’ve seen that. I saw that in the first term when we became more and more successful, people started coming together. Success is going to bring us together and we are going to start by all putting America first. We have to put our country first for at least a period of time. We have to fix it because together we can truly make America great again for all Americans. So I want to just tell you what a great honor this is.

I want to thank you. I will not let you down. America’s future will be bigger, better, bolder, richer, safer and stronger than it has ever been before. God bless you and God bless America. Thank you very much. Thank you.