The United States has seen its fair share of contested results throughout history after the votes have been cast on Election Day. In some cases, it was Congress that had to decide the final outcome of who would become the next US president with the one who lost out less than satisfied, but they still accepted the result.

However, while the term “sore loser” has been thrown around from time to time, there has only been one presidential candidate that has refused to concede their defeat at the ballot box even after the dust has settled.

Sore losers: the candidates who didn’t accept defeat in the US presidential election

Donald Trump has the sole distinction of meeting the true definition of a “sore loser” as he has never accepted his defeat in the 2020 election and continues to this day to complain about his 2020 loss. Even well before any ballots were cast, he declared that there would be fraud, and that the election would be stolen. However, this was his playbook in the 2016 election as well as this year’s.

This is despite such cases being exceptionally rare in US elections. And when it does occur, it is so statistically negligible that it cannot affect the outcome of an election.

In modern times, recent presidential elections have been decided by ever narrower margins of sometimes less than a single percent in just a few battleground states. This was the case in Georgia in 2020 where a recount was conducted to assure that the right candidate won the state’s 16 electoral votes. However, neither the hand-count audit nor the machine recount changed the result of Joe Biden’s victory in the state.

The Trump campaign also requested a recount in two counties in Wisconsin, Dane and Milwaukee, which both vote heavily Democratic. Once concluded, Biden had a net gain of 87 votes.

Neither candidate, Al Gore in 2000 and Hillary Clinton in 2016, that won the popular vote but lost the Electoral College vote refused to accept the outcome of the election although they were both called sore losers by the supporters of their election rivals, George W Bush and Donald Trump, respectively.

Al Gore conceded defeat on election night when it appeared that Bush had won Florida. However, he retracted his concession the following morning when the vote tally in the Sunshine State was so close that an automatic recount was triggered.

That process was stopped by a Supreme Court order on December 12 that year. Gore said that he disagreed with the decision but conceded the election.

Hillary Clinton for her part conceded her loss to Trump the morning after the election. However, campaign surrogates decried those calling for recounts in some states saying they were trying to “delegitimize” his 2016 victory.

Those same people would be at the forefront of the efforts to rollout the “Big Lie” in 2020 which helped stoke conspiracy theories and led to the assault on the US Capitol on January 6, 2021.