Two weeks later, it remains the most memorable moment of the vice presidential debate. Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz asked Ohio Sen. JD Vance, “Did he [Trump] lose the 2020 election?” The Republican refused to answer.

In the days that followed, the GOP vice presidential nominee faced the same question, over and over again. In each instance, Vance simply would not say whether his running mate won or lost — and in the process, the senator failed to acknowledge the legitimacy of the last American presidential election.

In one especially memorable exchange, The New York Times asked Vance five times whether Trump lost the 2020 race. Five times, Vance refused to answer, justifying his reluctance in an utterly absurd way.

That was last week. This week, as NBC News reported, there was a breakthrough of sorts.

In his most direct answer yet about the 2020 election results since he joined the Republican presidential ticket, Sen. JD Vance of Ohio appeared to say Wednesday that he does not believe Donald Trump lost the last presidential election. Fielding questions from reporters after he spoke at a rally in central Pennsylvania, Vance was pressed about recent appearances in which he has declined directly to say whether or not Trump lost his re-election bid against Joe Biden.

“I’ve answered this question directly a million times,” the GOP candidate said. “No. I think there are serious problems in 2020. So did Donald Trump lose the election? Not by the words that I would use.”

Vance used the most needlessly clumsy phrasing possible — how a bestselling author came up with “not by the words that I would use” I’ll never know — perhaps hoping the indirect word choice would make him look and sound less like an election denier.

But that won’t work. The GOP candidate is an election denier.

The facts are unambiguous. Vance saw the results of a free and fair election; he saw the results of dozens of lawsuits; he saw Trump fail spectacularly for nearly four years to produce even a shred of evidence; and he saw key figures surrounding Trump — his campaign manager, campaign data team, campaign lawyers, independent researchers, et al. — agree that the GOP’s 2020 ticket really did lose, fair and square.

And it’s against this backdrop that the Republican Party’s nominee for the nation’s second-highest office — after dodging straightforward questions for two weeks — has nevertheless decided to reject the legitimacy of an election outcome decided by his own country’s electorate.

There is no defense for such an overt rejection of democracy. Democrats have spent much of the 2024 race arguing that both members of the Republican ticket are hostile toward the American political system and the rule of law. Vance has now taken fresh steps to prove them right.