Heading into the final three weeks of the 2024 election, Senator JD Vance of Ohio will still not say whether his running mate won or lost the last race for the White House.

In an interview with The New York Times that will be published on Saturday, Mr. Vance repeatedly refused to acknowledge former President Donald J. Trump’s defeat and went to even greater lengths to avoid doing so than he did during the vice-presidential debate earlier this month.

When asked about the previous election during an hourlong interview with Lulu Garcia-Navarro, a host of “The Interview,” a Times podcast published each Saturday, the Republican vice-presidential nominee responded that he was “focused on the future.” It was the same phrase he used to evade the same question during his debate with his Democratic rival, Gov. Tim Walz of Minnesota.

“There’s an obsession here with focusing on 2020,” Mr. Vance said in the interview. “I’m much more worried about what happened after 2020, which is a wide-open border, groceries that are unaffordable.”

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When pressed a second time, Mr. Vance pivoted to a complicated counterargument: He suggested Mr. Trump would have won more votes in 2020 had social media companies not limited posts about a New York Post story about the contents of a laptop that belonged to Hunter Biden, President Biden’s son. Trump allies had maintained that documents on the laptop linked President Biden to corrupt business dealings, but those claims were unfounded.

“Senator Vance, I’m going to ask you again,” Ms. Garcia-Navarro said. “Did Donald Trump lose the 2020 election?”

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