JD Vance refused five times to acknowledge Donald Trump lost 2020 election, in podcast interview

NEW YORK —  JD Vance, the Republican vice presidential nominee, again refused to acknowledge that President Biden won the 2020 election over former President Trump, evading the question five times in an interview with the New York Times, the newspaper reported Friday.

The Ohio senator repeated the response he used during his debate against Tim Walz, the Democratic vice presidential nominee, saying he was “focused on the future.”

“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.”

Vance’s refusal to recognize the legitimacy of the 2020 election echoes the rhetoric pushed by his running mate. Trump has been charged criminally with knowingly pushing false claims of voter fraud and having “resorted to crimes” in his failed bid to cling to power after losing to Biden. Judges, election officials, cybersecurity experts and Trump’s own attorney general all have rejected his claims of mass voter fraud.

Vance spoke for an hour with Lulu Garcia-Navarro, host of the newspaper’s “The Interview” podcast, which will publish Saturday. He offered an evasive response each time she asked whether Trump lost the last election.

Vance blamed social media companies for limiting posts about the contents of a laptop once owned by Hunter Biden, the president’s son, asking if censorship by tech firms cost Trump millions of votes.

“I’ve answered your question with another question,” Vance said. “You answer my question and I’ll answer yours.”

When Garcia-Navarro said there was “no proof, legal or otherwise,” of election fraud, Vance dismissed the fact as “a slogan.”

“I’m not worried about this slogan that people throw, ‘Well, every court case went this way,’” Vance said. “I’m talking about something very discrete — a problem of censorship in this country that I do think affected things in 2020.”

Vance’s refusal to say whether Trump lost was widely considered his weakest moment of the debate against Walz, Minnesota’s governor, who called Vance’s response “a damning nonanswer.” Vice President Kamala Harris’ campaign quickly turned the exchange into a television ad.