2020 U.S. presidential election

The 2020 U.S. presidential election was held on November 3, 2020, during the COVID-19 pandemic. Joe Biden, the Democratic candidate and former vice president, defeated the Republican incumbent, Donald Trump. Biden won 306 electoral votes to Trump's 232, and he received more than 81 million popular votes, about 51.3 percent, against Trump's more than 74 million, about 46.9 percent. His running mate, Kamala Harris, became the first woman elected vice president. The result was not projected until November 7, because counting mail ballots took several days in closely contested states.¹²

The pandemic changed how Americans voted. Many states expanded mail and early voting, and according to the Census Bureau about 43 percent of voters cast their ballots by mail, roughly double the 21 percent of 2016, while another 26 percent voted in person before Election Day. About 67 percent of voting-age citizens reported voting, the highest turnout of the twenty-first century, and some 17 million more people voted than four years earlier, the largest increase between two presidential elections on record. The Census Bureau found that turnout rose most, by 7.7 percentage points over 2016, in the quarter of states where mail and early voting were used most heavily. Nearly seven in ten voters cast their ballots by some method other than going to the polls on Election Day.³⁴

Trump did not concede. He and his allies argued that the result had been distorted by fraud and irregularities, particularly in mail voting and in the counting in several swing states, and they brought more than 60 lawsuits. Courts dismissed or ruled against nearly all of them, often for lack of evidence; the one partial success concerned a small number of Pennsylvania ballots and did not involve fraud, and the U.S. Supreme Court declined to hear a Texas suit seeking to overturn results in four states. Every state certified its results, and Attorney General William Barr told the Associated Press on December 1, 2020 that the Justice Department had not seen fraud on a scale that could have changed the outcome. On January 6, 2021, as Congress met to count the electoral votes, a crowd of Trump supporters broke into the Capitol, delaying the count. Biden's victory was certified early the next morning, and he was inaugurated on January 20, 2021.¹⁵⁶