# 2020 Presidential Election The election conducted in the middle of the COVID-19 pandemic and ending in the first refused presidential concession in American history. [[Joe Biden]] (Democrat), the former Vice President and 36-year Senate veteran from Delaware, defeated incumbent [[Donald Trump]] (Republican) by 306 to 232 electoral votes — the same margin Trump had won by in 2016 — and by approximately 7 million in the popular vote (51.3% to 46.8%, a 4.5% margin). The election produced the **highest voter turnout since 1900** at 66.6% of eligible voters, with substantial expansion of mail-in and early voting in response to the pandemic. Biden won several swing states by narrow margins: **Georgia** by 11,779 votes (the first Democratic Georgia victory since 1992), **Arizona** by 10,457 votes (the first Democratic Arizona victory since 1996), **Wisconsin** by 20,682 votes, **Pennsylvania** by 80,555 votes, **Michigan** by 154,188 votes, **Nevada** by 33,596 votes. The narrowness of these margins, combined with the COVID-era mail-in-voting expansion, became the substrate for Trump's refusal to concede. Trump and his campaign legal team — [[Rudy Giuliani]], [[Sidney Powell]], [[Jenna Ellis]], and others — pursued more than 60 election-related lawsuits in the months following the election; the campaign's legal challenges lost in nearly every court including before judges Trump had himself appointed. The "**[[Stop the Steal]]**" movement organized rallies, protests, and pressure campaigns against state-level certification through November and December 2020. The Trump-Pence pressure campaign against Vice President [[Mike Pence]]'s constitutional role in certifying the electoral count culminated in the **January 6, 2021 attack on the U.S. Capitol** by a Trump-rally crowd that breached the Capitol building, threatened the lives of members of Congress and the Vice President, and delayed but did not prevent the certification of Biden's electoral votes. ## Result - **[[Joe Biden]]** (Democrat) — 306 electoral votes, 51.3% popular (81,283,501 votes) - **[[Donald Trump]]** (Republican) — 232 electoral votes, 46.8% popular (74,223,975 votes) - Total: 538 electoral votes - Turnout: 66.6% — highest since 1900 ## Right-wing significance The 2020 election is structurally one of the most consequential American elections of the past century. Three vectors: **The election-rejection regime.** Trump's refusal to concede, the "Stop the Steal" infrastructure, the false claims of widespread fraud, the legal-challenge campaign, the pressure on state officials ([[Brad Raffensperger]] in Georgia, Aaron Van Langevelde in Michigan, others), the pressure on Vice President Pence, and the eventual January 6 attack constitute the **first sustained American refusal of peacefully-transferring electoral defeat** since 1860-1861 (and even Buchanan's refusal in 1860 was passive rather than active). The post-2020 Republican Party has substantially organized around continued rejection of the 2020 outcome — a substantial portion of Republican voters continue to believe the 2020 election was illegitimate; Republican primary fields require some version of stolen-election framing as a basic litmus test; the 2024 Republican primary candidates who would not endorse the stolen-election framing ([[Liz Cheney]] being the most prominent) were politically destroyed. **The Electoral Count Reform Act of 2022.** Passed in response to January 6, the ECRA clarified the Vice President's role in counting electoral votes as ministerial rather than discretionary, raised the threshold for congressional objection to electoral votes, and tightened procedural rules around state-level certification. The legislation directly addresses procedural gaps that Trump's post-2020 strategy had exploited; the post-2024 application of the ECRA in the January 2025 certification was the first operational test. **The 2020-2024 political process.** The four years between Biden's January 2021 inauguration and Trump's January 2025 second inauguration is one of the most legally and politically active post-electoral periods in American history. The two Trump impeachments (the second on January 13, 2021, for incitement of insurrection), the four criminal cases against Trump (Manhattan hush-money, federal classified documents, federal January 6, Georgia state election interference), the January 6 House Select Committee investigation, the prosecution of more than 1,500 January 6 defendants, and the broader political-cultural fight over what 2020 meant are all downstream of the 2020 outcome and its refusal. ## Pandemic-era mechanics The 2020 election was conducted under conditions no previous American presidential election had faced. Mail-in voting expanded from roughly 25% of ballots in 2016 to roughly 46% of ballots in 2020. Early voting accounted for a substantial share of the remaining ballots. In-person Election Day voting was the *minority* of total ballots cast — an inversion of the previous American pattern. The pandemic-era expansion of voting access produced the highest turnout in 120 years; it also produced the procedural-and-narrative substrate for Trump's subsequent claims of fraud, which focused disproportionately on mail-in ballots (which Democratic voters used at much higher rates than Republican voters). ## Aftermath Biden took office January 20, 2021 — two weeks after the January 6 attack. The first two years produced the American Rescue Plan, [[Bipartisan Infrastructure Law]], [[CHIPS and Science Act]], and [[Inflation Reduction Act]]. The [[Russian invasion of Ukraine]] (February 2022) and the Israel-Hamas war (October 2023) dominated the second half of his term. Biden's June 27, 2024 debate against Trump made his continued candidacy politically untenable; he withdrew on July 21, 2024 and endorsed Vice President [[Kamala Harris]], who lost to Trump in November 2024. ## Connections - [[Joe Biden]] — Winner; ended Trump's first term. - [[Donald Trump]] — Defeated incumbent; refused to concede; subject of two impeachments and four criminal cases in subsequent years; returned to office in 2025. - [[Kamala Harris]] — Biden's VP; would become 2024 Democratic nominee. - [[Mike Pence]] — Trump's VP; refused to overturn certification on January 6; subject of Trump-rally chants of "Hang Mike Pence." - [[January 6 Capitol Attack]] — The aftermath event of January 6, 2021. ---