Hillary Clinton Has Privately Conceded the Presidential Race to Trump
This post is being updated as more news breaks.
2:08 a.m.: Hillary Clinton’s campaign chair, John Podesta, just announced that Hillary Clinton will not concede the Presidency to Donald Trump tonight.
“We’re going to count every vote,” Podesta said before telling all of the Hillary supporters waiting in Manhattan’s Javits Center that they could go home.
Right now, the numbers aren’t official but Donald Trump is projected to receive 248 electoral votes while Clinton has 218, according to NBC. A nominee needs 270 electoral votes to win.
Not all of the votes are in. When it’s this early, the numbers are based on statistics and predictions, so it’s true that not all the votes are counted. But for Clinton to win, several states’ numbers would need to change to the tune of tens of thousands. It’s not impossible, but it seems unlikely.
It’s somewhat unusual for a presidential nominee to refuse to concede the night of the election. It happened in 2004 when Al Gore ran against George Bush and the election didn’t end for weeks. When it did, Bush’s lead over Al Gore was tiny.
UPDATE 2:35 a.m.: The Associated Press has called the election for Trump and Trump is supposedly going to speak shortly.
UPDATE 2:41 a.m.: NBC is reporting that Hillary Clinton has conceded the election to Trump with a private phone call.
