Turnout: 66.60%
About this election
The 2020 United States presidential election, held on 3 November 2020, saw Democratic nominee Joe Biden, a former vice-president and long-serving senator from Delaware, defeat the Republican incumbent Donald Trump. Biden won the Electoral College by 306 votes to 232 and the national popular vote by a wide margin: 81,283,501 votes (51.31%) to Trump's 74,223,975 (46.86%). Biden's total was the most votes ever cast for a presidential candidate, and Trump's was the second-most; turnout reached an estimated 66.6% of eligible voters, the highest by that measure since 1900. Biden's running mate, Senator Kamala Harris of California, became the first woman, the first Black American and the first person of South Asian descent elected vice-president.
As in every presidential year, the contest was decided by the Electoral College, with 270 of 538 votes needed to win. The 2020 election was notable for its split districts in the two states that divide their electors: Nebraska awarded one vote to Biden from its second district (Omaha), while Maine awarded one to Trump from its second district, mirroring in reverse the 2016 pattern.
The election was conducted in the shadow of the COVID-19 pandemic, which by election day had killed more than 230,000 Americans and devastated the economy. The crisis reshaped both the campaign and the mechanics of voting: rallies gave way to virtual events, and a record share of ballots were cast early or by mail, a shift that drew sustained attacks from Trump, who claimed without evidence that mail voting would produce fraud. Biden, who emerged from the Democratic primaries as the consensus moderate after early stumbles, framed the race as a "battle for the soul of the nation" and a referendum on Trump's handling of the pandemic, the economy and race relations, the last inflamed by nationwide protests after the killing of George Floyd in May 2020.
Biden assembled his majority by rebuilding the Democratic "Blue Wall," reclaiming Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin, and by flipping two states that had trended Republican for a generation: Arizona, which a Democrat had carried only once since 1948, and Georgia, won by a Democrat for the first time since 1992. Trump flipped no states that he had lost in 2016. The state-by-state map shows how a relatively small number of votes across the Sun Belt and the industrial Midwest delivered the presidency: Biden's margins in Arizona, Georgia and Wisconsin were each under a point.
Trump refused to concede and launched dozens of lawsuits alleging fraud, nearly all of which were dismissed for lack of evidence; recounts and audits in the contested states confirmed Biden's victory. The crisis culminated on 6 January 2021, when a mob of Trump supporters stormed the United States Capitol in an attempt to halt Congress's certification of the result. Congress nonetheless certified Biden's win in the early hours of 7 January, and he was inaugurated on 20 January 2021. The events of that period reshaped American politics and led to Trump's second impeachment.
Biden's victory made Trump the first president since 1992 to lose re-election after a single term. It restored Democratic control of the White House and, after the January 2021 Georgia Senate runoffs, gave the party unified control of government. Yet the closeness of the decisive states, and the durability of Trump's support, foreshadowed both the Democrats' difficult 2022 and 2024 elections and Trump's eventual return to the presidency.
Federal Election Commission (FEC), official 2020 presidential general-election results — fec.gov.
Compiled and reviewed by Bartłomiej Paruzel, Election Data Analyst, from official results. See our data methodology.