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Vice President Kamala Harris plans to spend election night in Washington, with her campaign eyeing her alma mater, Howard University, as a possible venue for her to speak from, according to seven people familiar with the planning.
While it’s possible the election results could be known within hours and not days, the Democratic campaign is preparing for a much longer stretch — perhaps even an election “week” — without an outcome, these people said.
That plan could include several different speeches and venues for delivering them. Precisely what Harris says publicly and the backdrop for her remarks would depend on how Election Day and the rest of the week unfolds, the people familiar with the planning said.
“Bottom line: We have to be ready for anything,” one of the people said.
The Harris campaign did not return a request for comment.
The careful planning reflects the new reality presidential campaigns face after the drawn-out counting process in 2020, only heightened by how close the 2024 race appears to be and how long it could take for the final tallies to materialize in the key battleground states.
Howard University is currently a leading contender for Harris’ election night headquarters, but no final decisions have been made. Other locations are being scouted as well, according to four of the people involved in the planning. Two of those people said that the D.C. convention center is one of the other options.
The idea of spending election night where the Harris campaign headquarters is — President Joe Biden’s hometown of Wilmington, Delaware — wasn’t a natural fit for the vice president, who is from California. She inherited the campaign and location of its headquarters from Biden when he dropped out of the race in July.
If a winner remains undeclared for days, it’s possible Harris could address the country multiple times, the people familiar with the planning said. If former President Donald Trump were to declare victory before the results are in, as he wrongly did in 2020, there would be a campaign strategy for handling that, they said.
The Harris campaign is also preparing for possible legal challenges that could end up deciding the race and has been assembling a team of lawyers to handle the potential battle with Trump’s attorneys, one of the people familiar with the planning said.
Harris aides are also bracing for the possibility that Trump could lose but then seek to overturn the results through the courts, this person said.
Though there are preparations developing behind the scenes, Harris aides don’t expect the vice president to talk about these various scenarios on the campaign trail because they don’t want to depress voters with the idea that their ballots could ultimately be discounted somehow by a legal outcome.
“People need to go out and vote. You don’t want people thinking about legal challenges,” one Harris aide said.
Beyond the length of time it took to call the election in 2020, the Harris team is also looking to lessons from the 2000 election as a guide and hoping to avoid a very protracted battle.
As a trained attorney, Harris herself has thought about how Trump could react in various scenarios, one Harris aide said.
And as the vice presidential nominee last cycle, she had a front row seat to how the process played out when Trump lost but repeatedly claimed he won. That began with Trump declaring himself the winner during remarks at the White House in the overnight hours of Election Day.
Biden, for his part, also spoke briefly on election night, slightly before 1 a.m. He appeared from Wilmington and urged Americans to be patient as the nation awaited results.
“We feel good about where we are, we really do,” Biden said at the time. “We’re gonna have to be patient until the hard work of tallying votes is finished, and it ain’t over until every vote is counted.”
Biden then spoke several more times that week, both to reporters and to the nation, saying he was “confident” he and Harris would be declared the winners once all was settled but said they were still waiting for a final call.
Once that happened on Saturday, four days after the election, Biden and Harris both delivered victory speeches from Wilmington.
