Vice presidential candidate JD Vance said he would not have certified the 2020 election results, and refused to acknowledge Donald Trump’s loss numerous times during an interview with The New York Times previewed on Friday.
Vance told The Interview host Lulu Garcia-Navarro that he was “focused on the future” instead.
“There’s an obsession here with focusing on 2020,” Vance said in the interview. “I’m much more worried about what happened after 2020, which is a wide-open border, groceries that are unaffordable.”
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Yet Garcia-Navarro did not let him off the hook. “Senator Vance, I’m going to ask you again,” she said. “Did Donald Trump lose the 2020 election?”
Instead of giving a yes-or-no response, Vance talked about censorship, baselessly claiming that “big technology companies” censored stories about Hunter Biden’s laptop—which cost Trump “millions of votes,” according to Vance.
When Garcia-Navarro underscored that there had been “no proof, legal or otherwise” of election fraud, Vance refused to answer her 2020 election question a fifth time. He added that he is “not worried about this slogan that people throw [around].”
He continued, “I’m talking about something very discrete—a problem of censorship in this country that I do think affected things in 2020.”
Vance’s full NYT interview is set to be released Saturday, but his non-answers are nothing new. During his debate against Kamala Harris’ VP pick Tim Walz on Oct. 1, he was pressed again to confirm Trump’s 2020 election loss.
“Tim, I’m focused on the future,” he told Walz, adding, “did Kamala Harris censor Americans from speaking their mind in the wake of the 2020 COVID situation?”
Walz called Vance’s response “a damning non-answer” and pointed out that Trump dumped his last VP pick, Mike Pence, because he certified the 2020 election results.
However, Vance told NYT that he would not have certified the 2020 election results, but added that he would “commit to a peaceful transfer of power” in 2024.
“If there are problems, of course, in the same way that Democrats protested in 2004 and Donald Trump raised issues in 2020, we’re going to make sure that this election counts,” Vance said.
Yet with voters casting their votes in less than 25 days—and Harris taking the lead in crucial polls—Vance’s non-answers could all be a rehearsal for Election Day.
