FLASHBACK: Clinton vs. Trump on Conceding the Election — and What This Whole Recount Thing Is Really All About

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Politicos and the media, alike, have been buzzing in recent days amid calls for electoral recounts — demands that emerged three weeks after the conclusion of the contentious 2016 election, and just as the dust was seemingly starting to settle.

Before we get into the strong reactions coming from president-elect Donald Trump and advisers of former Democratic candidate Hillary Clinton, let’s briefly break down what, exactly, has been going on.

To begin: Jill Stein, the former Green Party presidential candidate, is on a quest to seek recounts of the election results in Wisconsin, Michigan and Pennsylvania — an effort she’s waging to ensure electoral integrity, though she doesn’t anticipate that these recounts will change the actual results of the election.

Stein has raised more than $6 million to pay for the effort, and is pushing as hard as possible to ensure that the recounts unfold by hand, even resorting to a legal challenge to push for a hand recount rather than an electronic one.

With that out of the way and before diving deeper into the recount battle, let’s now review what both Trump and Clinton said about the electoral process in the not-so-distant past, particularly comments they both made at the third and final presidential debate about accepting the results of the Nov. 8 election.

A notable exchange unfolded when moderator Chris Wallace asked Trump about his rhetoric that the election is “rigged” and Trump’s belief that Clinton was attempting to steal it. He then asked whether the Republican businessman would “absolutely accept the result of this election?” to which Trump responded that he’d look at the prospects once the election unfolded.

Wallace, of course, pushed back.

“One of the prides of this country — is the peaceful transition of power and that no matter how hard-fought a campaign is, that at the end of the campaign that the loser concedes to the winner,” Wallace responded. “Not saying that you’re necessarily going to be the loser or the winner, but that the loser concedes to the winner and that the country comes together in part for the good of the country. Are you saying you’re not prepared now to commit to that principle?”

Trump repeated his claim that he would wait until election day to decide — and that’s when Clinton stepped in to call Trump’s refusal to accept the results “horrifying” and “troubling.”

“That is not the way our democracy works. We’ve been around for 240 years. We’ve had free and fair elections,” Clinton said. “We’ve accepted the outcomes when we may not have liked them. And that is what must be expected of anyone standing on a debate stage during a general election.”

She continued, “He is denigrating — he’s talking down our democracy. And I, for one, am appalled that somebody who is the nominee of one of our two major parties would take that kind of position.”

Watch that intense exchange unfold below:

But when Nov. 8 rolled around and Trump secured his surprising victory, Clinton conceded, delivering a candid speech the day after the election during which she encouraged people to accept the result of the election and give Trump a chance to lead.

“I still believe in America and I always will. And if you do, then we must accept this result and then look to the future. Donald Trump is going to be our president,” she said. “We owe him an open mind and a chance to lead. Our constitutional democracy enshrines the peaceful transfer of power. And we don’t just respect that, we cherish it.”

See the concession speech below:

Flash forward a few weeks and the Clinton campaign has agreed to join Stein’s recount effort — a move that has led to some critiques of Clinton and her staffers, considering her previous comments during the debate and concession. In addition to joining the Wisconsin effort, the Clinton campaign said it would also potentially participate in recounts in Pennsylvania as well as Michigan, The New York Times reported.

Marc Elias, general counsel for Clinton’s team, published a post on Medium explaining why — despite not believing that a recount will change the results of the election — the campaign has agreed to participate.

“Because we had not uncovered any actionable evidence of hacking or outside attempts to alter the voting technology, we had not planned to exercise this option ourselves, but now that a recount has been initiated in Wisconsin, we intend to participate in order to ensure the process proceeds in a manner that is fair to all sides,” Elias wrote.

Trump has lambasted the recount effort, unveiling a series of tweets on Sunday that were quite critical of the Clinton and Stein camps — and also making a provocative claim that has been roundly criticized as untrue.

“The Green Party scam to fill up their coffers by asking for impossible recounts is now being joined by the badly defeated & demoralized Dems,” Trump wrote. “The Democrats, when they incorrectly thought they were going to win, asked that the election night tabulation be accepted. Not so anymore!”

He then proceeded to quote Clinton’s comments during the third about Trump’s refusal to commit to conceding if warranted, saying that wasting money on a recount will be “sad.” But it was his comment about illegal voting that got the most attention.

“In addition to winning the Electoral College in a landslide, I won the popular vote if you deduct the millions of people who voted illegally,” Trump wrote. The New York Times, among others, pushed back against this claim, saying Trump had no evidence to back it.

In the end, chaos aside, only one thing is painfully clear: the contention that characterized the 2016 presidential election has yet to simmer, with no immediate end in sight.

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