Losing the U.S. Presidential Election with Grace: John McCain’s Concession Speech

Abstract

It has been a tradition for a defeated candidate of the U.S. presidential election to give a concession speech as soon as the winner is determined. In 2020, however, Donald Trump refused to concede the election to Joe Biden. This was considered to have impeded the peaceful transfer of power. Some even suspected that it might have contributed to the attack on the U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2021. As Trump continued to refuse conceding defeat, a video of John McCain’s concession speech in the 2008 presidential election resurfaced on the internet. In this article, I examine McCain’s concession speech and consider how the defeated presidential candidates should communicate with the public. The main purpose of this article is not to criticize Trump for his unwillingness to concede but to clarify the American values that are embodied in McCain’s concession speech and his actions surrounding it. Given the relative lack of communication research on concession speeches, this article has a potential to demonstrate the validity of research that treats concession speeches as a genre of political discourse.