2020 United States presidential election

• 1. Introduction

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  The 2020 United States presidential election took place on the 3rd of November 2020, and its winner collected more than 81 million votes, the most ever cast for a presidential candidate in American history. Even so, when the polls closed, nobody could say who had won.

  The Democratic ticket paired Joe Biden, a former vice president, with Kamala Harris, a senator from California. Harris was the first African American and the first Asian American on a major party ticket as vice presidential nominee. She was also only the third woman to hold that spot. Their opponents were the Republican incumbent, Donald Trump, and his vice president, Mike Pence.

  This was a contest run through a pandemic, a summer of civil unrest, a sudden vacancy on the Supreme Court and a historic flood of ballots sent through the mail. How did a country campaign, and vote, under those conditions? Why did the count stretch over several days? How close did the result come to turning on a sliver of votes in a handful of places? And what happened when the man who lost refused to accept it?

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• 2. Campaign Without Crowds

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  On the 10th of March 2020, after primaries in six states, Joe Biden and Bernie Sanders cancelled their planned campaign-night events. Two days later, Donald Trump said he would postpone further rallies. By the 24th of March, every major-party candidate had halted in-person campaigning. The 11th Democratic debate, held on the 15th of March at the CNN studios in Washington, had no audience at all.

  Wisconsin showed what carrying on could cost. The Supreme Court and Republican legislators there rebuffed Governor Tony Evers's request to move the state's spring elections to June, so voting went ahead on the 7th of April, presidential primary included. At least seven new cases of the virus were traced to it. Georgia, Kentucky, Louisiana, Ohio and Maryland chose to push their primaries back instead. Elsewhere, voters met long lines and fewer polling places, because few election workers were willing to serve. Many people complained that the absentee ballots they had requested never arrived.

  The party conventions bent to the same pressure. Milwaukee was supposed to host the Democrats from the 13th to the 16th of July. The event slid to the 17th through the 20th of August and became a mostly remote affair, with major speeches, Biden's included, delivered virtually. Biden had already become the presumptive nominee on the 8th of April, when Sanders withdrew.

  The Republicans had a messier time. Charlotte, North Carolina, was to host a three-day convention, but the state insisted on social distancing rules. The speeches were moved to Jacksonville, Florida, and then that plan collapsed as the virus worsened there. The party returned to Charlotte in a scaled-down form for the 24th to the 27th of August. Trump had already won 2,549 of 2,550 delegates, one of the largest hauls in primary history, after easily beating former Massachusetts governor Bill Weld.

  The smaller parties scrambled too. The Libertarians lost every reservation at the JW Marriott Downtown Austin on the 26th of April, so they split into two conventions. One was online and picked Jo Jorgensen on the 23rd of May, and one was held in person in Orlando in July. The Greens had planned on Detroit but met online instead.

  On the 20th of June, Trump's campaign held a rally in Tulsa, Oklahoma, after the Oklahoma Supreme Court ruled it could proceed. Attendance fell far short of expectations, and the event was described as a flop. Relations with his campaign manager, Brad Parscale, worsened significantly. Still, 7.7 million people watched on Fox News, a Saturday audience record for the channel. Three weeks later Oklahoma recorded record case numbers. Herman Cain, a former Republican presidential candidate, died of the virus, though nobody confirmed he caught it at the rally.

  On the 2nd of October, Trump and First Lady Melania Trump tested positive, following a positive test from senior advisor Hope Hicks. The president was admitted to Walter Reed National Military Medical Center with a low-grade fever and reportedly received an experimental antibody treatment. His diagnosis came just two days after the first debate, and Biden tested negative. Trump was discharged on the 5th of October and resumed rallies on the 12th, sometimes holding two or three in a day. Biden kept campaigning but briefly paused his attack ads. Critics pointed to the lack of masks and distancing at the rallies, and some polls suggested voters thought less of Trump for it.

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• 3. The Mail Ballot Surge

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  In both 2016 and 2018, a quarter of American voters mailed in their ballots. By August 2020, a state-by-state analysis found that 76% of Americans were eligible to vote by mail, a record. The same analysis predicted 80 million mailed ballots, more than double the 2016 number.

  The Postal Service was not ready. In July, it warned multiple states that it could not meet their deadlines for last-minute absentee requests and returns. The newly installed Postmaster General, Louis DeJoy, had banned overtime and extra delivery trips. Hundreds of high-speed sorting machines had also been dismantled and removed from postal centers. On the 18th of August, the House of Representatives was recalled from its August break to vote on a bill reversing the changes. That day DeJoy announced he would roll back all of them until after the election. The House then voted an emergency grant of $25 billion for the post office.

  Trump's own position was tangled. By May, his campaign was loudly opposing mail-in voting, claiming it would cause widespread fraud, a belief that media organizations discredited. In August he conceded that the post office needed more money but said he would block extra funding to keep mail voting from rising. Yet he cast mailed ballots himself, because he was in a different state from the one where he votes. In September, FBI Director Christopher Wray, whom Trump had appointed, testified under oath that the bureau had "not seen, historically, any kind of coordinated national voter fraud effort in a major election, whether it's by mail or otherwise".

  The eventual numbers were enormous. More than 158 million votes were cast, and over 100 million of them arrived before Election Day, by early voting or by mail. Across 41 reporting states, an estimated 42 percent of ballots came by mail, roughly 65.6 million out of 154.6 million. Thirty-eight states saw more than half their votes cast early or by mail, and only three had fewer than 25%. That volume is why some swing states were slow to count and report.

  The courts became a second front. The Trump campaign sued to block ballot dropboxes in Pennsylvania anywhere other than an election office. It also sought to stop officials from counting mailed ballots that lacked a secrecy sleeve. After a federal judge ordered it to produce evidence of vote-by-mail fraud, the campaign and the Republican Party produced none. On Election Day itself, a judge ordered mail inspectors to search facilities in key battleground states for ballots. The agency refused, and nearly 7% of the ballots in postal facilities that day were not processed in time.

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• 4. Shocks and Showdowns

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  On the 18th of December 2019, the House of Representatives voted to impeach Trump on two counts. The Senate trial ran from the 21st of January to the 5th of February 2020 and ended in acquittal. It was the second time a president had been impeached in his first term while running for a second. It was also the first time since the modern primaries began in 1911 that a president faced impeachment mid-season. Senators seeking the Democratic nomination had to stay in Washington for the trial, right around the Iowa caucuses.

  On the 18th of September, Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg died. Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell immediately declared that the precedent he had set over the Merrick Garland nomination no longer applied. On the 26th of September, a day after Ginsburg's body lay in state at the Capitol, Trump staged a Rose Garden ceremony to introduce Amy Coney Barrett. After four days of hearings, the Judiciary Committee sent her nomination to the floor on the 22nd of October. On the 26th, she was confirmed 52-48, with no Democrat in favor. No Supreme Court confirmation had come closer to a presidential election, and none since 1869 had won no votes from the minority party.

  By September, several hundred election lawsuits had been filed, about 250 of them over voting mechanics during the pandemic. The Supreme Court mostly issued emergency stays rather than following its normal process. By October, people were openly speculating that the justices might decide the election, as they had in 2000.

  The Commission on Presidential Debates announced three debates on the 11th of October 2019. The first took place on the 29th of September in Cleveland, Ohio, with Chris Wallace moderating. It was meant for the University of Notre Dame, but the school backed out over the pandemic. Biden was generally held to have won. One moment drew particular attention, when Trump did not directly denounce the Proud Boys and told them to "stand back and stand by". The next day he said they should "stand down" but claimed he did not know who they were. Repeated interruptions led some to call the night "chaotic and nearly incoherent", and the commission began weighing format changes. The audience was 73.1 million.

  The vice presidential debate in Salt Lake City, Utah, on the 7th of October, moderated by Susan Page, was subdued, and no clear winner emerged. What people remembered was a fly that landed on Pence's head and stayed there, unnoticed by him, for two minutes. About 57.9 million people watched.

  The second presidential debate never happened. The University of Michigan had withdrawn in June, and the event moved to the Arsht Center in Miami for the 15th of October. After Trump's diagnosis, the commission announced on the 8th that candidates would appear remotely. Trump refused, and the debate was cancelled. The third debate, at Belmont University in Nashville on the 22nd of October, was moderated by Kristen Welker. Muted microphones while the other candidate spoke made it far more civil, and Welker was widely praised. Biden was generally held to have won, though it was unlikely to move the race much. Around 63 million tuned in.

  The Free and Equal Elections Foundation also held two debates for third-party and independent candidates, in Denver on the 8th of October and in Cheyenne on the 24th. Meanwhile, OpenSecrets estimated that the whole election cost nearly $14 billion, twice the previous cycle's price. The Federal Election Commission, which polices campaign finance, had lacked the members to function since July, and as of the 1st of September Trump had nominated no one to fill its vacancies.

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• 5. Warnings Before the Vote

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  On the 13th of February 2020, Shelby Pierson, the intelligence community's top election security official, briefed the House Intelligence Committee. Her message was that Russia was interfering in order to help Trump win re-election. The president was angered that Congress had been told, and the following day he castigated acting Director of National Intelligence Joseph Maguire for allowing the briefing.

  On the 21st of February, The Washington Post reported that unnamed officials said Russia was also meddling in the Democratic primary to help Sanders. Sanders answered with a statement: "I don't care, frankly, who Putin wants to be president. My message to Putin is clear: stay out of American elections, and as president, I will make sure that you do." He added that his campaign had been briefed on the effort about a month earlier.

  Iran drew the sharpest accusations. Back on the 4th of October 2019, Microsoft had said a hacking group called Phosphorus, linked to the Iranian government, tried to break into email accounts of journalists, officials and a presidential campaign. Then, on the 21st of October 2020, threatening emails reached Democrats in at least four states. They warned: "You will vote for Trump on Election Day or we will come after you." That evening Director of National Intelligence John Ratcliffe blamed Iran, noting that Iran and Russia had both obtained American voter registration data. Iran denied it. Ratcliffe added that Iran meant to damage Trump, a claim that puzzled observers, and it later emerged he had added that line himself. In November 2021, the Justice Department charged two Iranian hackers over the emails. China was also accused, with a Chinese spokesman, Geng Shuang, rejecting the claim, and intelligence officials disputed whether Beijing was actually trying to help either candidate.

  The feared attack on the vote itself did not come. Chris Krebs, the director of the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, watched Election Day from a joint command center alongside the NSA, the FBI, Cyber Command and the Secret Service. Speaking in December 2020, after he had been dismissed, he said: "It was quiet. There was no indication or evidence that there was any sort of hacking or compromise of election systems on, before, or after November third." He also rejected claims that votes were counted abroad, saying "All votes in the United States of America are counted in the United States of America."

  The other warning came from the president. In July, asked by Chris Wallace of Fox News whether he would accept the result, Trump replied, "I have to see. No, I'm not going to just say yes. I'm not going to say no." He said that the only way he could lose was if the vote were rigged, and he repeatedly declined to commit to a peaceful transfer of power. Of mailed ballots he said, "there won't be a transfer, frankly. There will be a continuation." On the 24th of September the Senate unanimously passed a resolution affirming its commitment to a peaceful transfer.

  Talk of delaying the election surfaced too. In April, Biden predicted Trump would "kick back the election somehow". In May, Jared Kushner would not rule a delay out. On the 30th of July, Trump tweeted that universal mail-in voting would make 2020 "the most INACCURATE & FRAUDULENT Election in history" and floated postponement. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo said the Justice Department would decide. In fact only Congress schedules elections, and the Constitution ends the terms of the president and vice president on the 20th of January, a deadline that only an amendment could move.

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• 6. Margins and Maps

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  Three numbers decided the Electoral College. Biden won Georgia by 11,779 votes, or 0.23%. He took Arizona by 10,457, or 0.30%. He carried Wisconsin, the tipping-point state for his victory, by 20,682, or 0.63%. Together that was about 43,000 votes, or 0.03% of the votes cast nationally.

  If those three states had gone the other way, each candidate would have held 269 electors. The House of Representatives would then have chosen the president, with each state delegation casting one vote. Because a slight majority of delegations had more Republicans than Democrats, Trump would have held the advantage, even with Democrats controlling the House. The 2016 race had a parallel. A shift of about 77,000 votes across Wisconsin, Michigan and Pennsylvania would have handed Hillary Clinton the electoral win as well. Pennsylvania, at 1.16% and 80,555 votes, was the tipping-point state for Trump.

  The final tally was Biden 306 electoral votes and 51.3% of the popular vote, Trump 232 and 46.8%. That was the exact reverse of Trump's 306-232 win in 2016. Biden won 25 states, the District of Columbia and one Nebraska district. Trump won 25 states and one Maine district. Five states Trump took in 2016 flipped: Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin. Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin carry a combined 46 electoral votes, and their return was widely described as a rebuilding of the "blue wall".

  Maine and Nebraska divide their electoral votes by congressional district, which is why the split happened. Maine had also just become the first state to use ranked-choice voting in a presidential general election. Governor Janet Mills let the 2019 bill become law without her signature. A Republican veto referendum failed for lack of valid signatures. Secretary of State Matthew Dunlap's ruling was upheld by the state's top court on the 22nd of September, and an emergency appeal to the Supreme Court was denied on the 6th of October. In the end, no extra rounds of counting were needed.

  The records piled up. Turnout, as a share of eligible voters, was the highest since 1900. Each major ticket topped 74 million votes, beating Barack Obama's 2008 record of 69.5 million. Trump was the 11th incumbent to lose a second-term bid and the first since George H. W. Bush in 1992. Biden's share was the highest for a challenger to a sitting president since 1932. He won without Florida for the first time for any victor since 1992 and without Ohio since 1960. That cast doubt on Ohio's bellwether status. Biden was also the first Democrat to take Georgia since 1992 and Arizona since 1996.

  The county map told a different story. Trump won the most votes in 2,595 of 3,153 counties and county equivalents, or 82.30%, against 558 for Biden. The most Democratic county was Kalawao County, Hawaii, at 95.8%. The most Republican was Roberts County, Texas, at 96.18%. Jo Jorgensen won 1.18% nationally and Howie Hawkins 0.26%.

  Biden's age made its own history. At 77, he was the oldest non-incumbent ever to win, topping the record Trump set at 70 in 2016. He was also the oldest person elected president, passing Ronald Reagan, who was 73 when re-elected in 1984. In 2024, Trump surpassed both marks at age 78.

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• 7. What Voters Cared About

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  Edison Research surveyed 15,590 voters in person and by phone for the National Election Pool, a consortium that includes ABC News, CBS News, MSNBC, CNN, Fox News and the Associated Press. Asked to name the most important issue, 35% chose the economy, and those voters went 82% for Trump. Another 20% named racial inequality and went 92% for Biden. The 17% who named the pandemic favored Biden 81% to 16%.

  Trump ran on the record of his first three years. He pointed to the longest stock market growth period in history, an unemployment rate at a fifty-year low and a 33.1% annualized rebound in third-quarter growth. Biden replied that Trump had inherited that economy from the Obama administration and made the pandemic damage worse, noting that 42 million Americans had filed for unemployment. The 2017 Tax Cuts and Jobs Act, which cut the corporate rate from 35% to 21%, anchored Trump's agenda. Biden planned higher taxes on corporations and on people earning over $400,000.

  The killing of George Floyd set off protests across the country in mid-2020. Fewer than 4% involved property damage or violence. Still, an estimate from September put insured damage between the 26th of May and the 8th of June at $1-2 billion, the most recorded for any civil disorder in American history. Trump and Republicans floated sending in the military. He also posed for a photo in front of St. John's Church in Washington after military police forcefully cleared peaceful protestors from the area. Biden called Floyd's words "I can't breathe" a "wake-up call for our nation" and promised a police oversight commission within his first 100 days. In the exit poll, 57% of voters viewed Black Lives Matter favorably and 37% unfavorably.

  The environment and health care split the candidates just as sharply. Trump began the withdrawal from the Paris Agreement, while Biden pledged to rejoin it and announced a $2 trillion climate plan. On the Affordable Care Act, Trump promised repeal, calling it "too expensive", but named no replacement. His administration and Republican officials from 18 states had a lawsuit before the Supreme Court seeking exactly that. Biden favored a public option. In the exit poll, 51% wanted the court to keep the law as it was, and 44% wanted it overturned.

  The exit polls also drew a map of who voted for whom. Women favored Biden 57% to 42%, while men favored Trump 53% to 45%. White voters went for Trump 58% to 41%. Black voters backed Biden 87% to 12%, and Latino voters backed him 65% to 33%. Urban voters chose Biden 60% to 38%, and rural voters chose Trump 57% to 42%. First-time voters broke for Biden 64% to 32%.

  On the 12th of November, the Brookings Institution published William H. Frey's analysis, titled "Exit polls show both familiar and new voting blocs sealed Biden's win". Frey found that Trump's margin among white voters shrank from 20 points in 2016 to 16. Democrats won Black voters by 75 points, the narrowest since 1980. They won Latinos by 32 points, the smallest since 2004, and Asian Americans by 27, the lowest since 2008. Trump's margin among white men without college degrees dropped from 48 points to 42.

  Almost every county that had long predicted the national winner voted for Trump instead and lost its streak. Analysts blamed rising polarization and the urban-rural divide. Even so, Trump lost some rural areas, and Biden won 50.5% of the rural counties with mostly non-white populations, especially in the South and West.

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• 8. Calling the Race

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  At 12:35 a.m. Eastern time on the 4th of November, the Associated Press called Florida for Trump, which put him at 164 electoral votes. By 1:06 a.m. it had called Texas for him as well, leaving the count at 202 for Trump against 224 for Biden. Arizona and Maine went to Biden at 2:51 a.m. and 3:06 a.m. That afternoon, Maine's 2nd congressional district went to Trump at 1:24 p.m., for 203 electoral votes. Wisconsin followed for Biden at 2:16 p.m. and Michigan at 3:58 p.m., leaving him just six electoral votes short.

  The last piece was Pennsylvania. At about 11:25 a.m. on the 7th of November, roughly three and a half days after polls closed, ABC News, NBC News, CBS News, the Associated Press, CNN and Fox News all called the race. They awarded Pennsylvania's 20 electoral votes to Biden, because his lead sat outside the state's 0.5% recount threshold. That took him to 284. That evening, Biden and Harris gave victory speeches in Wilmington, Delaware.

  The Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe had monitored American elections since 2002, and the State Department invited it back. The pandemic shrank its mission to 102 observers from 39 countries, down from a plan of 100 long-term and 400 short-term observers. Urszula Gacek, a former Polish diplomat, led the long-term team. German parliamentarian Michael Georg Link led the short-term group of lawmakers. Their interim report had warned that officials feared the legitimacy of the vote would be questioned over the incumbent's repeated fraud allegations.

  The day after the election, the observers called it competitive and well managed despite legal uncertainty and logistical strain. They said late legal challenges and "evidence-deficient claims about election fraud" had unsettled officials and voters. They also called voter registration and identification rules in some states unduly restrictive for certain groups. Link said that on Election Day, "we couldn't see any violations" at the polling places the team visited. Gacek, after the team found "nothing untoward" in how mailed ballots were handled at post offices, said: "We feel that allegations of systemic wrongdoing in these elections have no solid ground. The system has held up well."

  Trump refused to accept the result. He and his allies made fraud claims that were disproven, pressured election officials and filed a series of unsuccessful lawsuits. They also tried directly to overturn the outcome at the county, state and federal levels.

  On the 14th of December, pledged electors met in their state capitols to cast their official votes. Under the Electoral Count Act of 1887, certificates listing the electors and their votes went to officials across the branches of government. Congress then met in joint session, with the vice president presiding, to count them. The session began on the 6th of January 2021, was interrupted by the attack on the United States Capitol, and finished the next day. Trump was impeached a second time. In a video posted to Twitter the day after the attack, he said a "new administration" would succeed his, without once naming Biden.

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