2020 United States presidential election

Presidential elections were held in the United States on November 3, 2020. The Democratic ticket of former vice president Joe Biden and California junior senator Kamala Harris defeated the incumbent Republican president Donald Trump and vice president Mike Pence. The election saw the highest voter turnout by percentage since 1900. Biden received more than 81 million votes, the most votes ever cast for a presidential candidate in U.S. history. In a competitive primary that featured the most candidates for any political party in the modern era of American politics, Biden secured the Democratic presidential nomination. Biden's running mate, Harris, became the first African American, first Asian American, and third female vice presidential nominee on a major party ticket. Trump easily secured re-nomination with only minor opposition in the Republican primaries. Jo Jorgensen secured the Libertarian presidential nomination with Spike Cohen as her running mate, and Howie Hawkins secured the Green presidential nomination with Angela Nicole Walker as his running mate. The central issues of the election included the public health and economic impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic; civil unrest in reaction to the police murder of George Floyd, the Supreme Court following the death of Ruth Bader Ginsburg and confirmation of Amy Coney Barrett, and the future of the Affordable Care Act. Due to the ongoing pandemic, a record number of ballots were cast early and by mail. Thirty-eight states had over half of all votes cast using these methods, and only three states had fewer than 25%. As a result of a large number of mail-in ballots, some swing states saw delays in vote counting and reporting; this led to major news outlets delaying their projection of Biden and Harris as the president-elect and vice president-elect until the morning of November 7, 2020. Biden achieved victory in the Electoral College, winning 306 electoral votes, while Trump received 232. Trump was the first president to lose re-election since George H. W. Bush in 1992. Key to Biden's victory were his wins in the Democratic-leaning Rust Belt states of Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin, which Trump narrowly carried in 2016 and whose combined 46 electoral votes were enough to swing the election to either candidate. This election marked the first time since 1948 that the Democratic Party won the popular vote in four consecutive elections. Trump refused to accept the results; he and his allies made disproven claims of fraud, pressured elections officials, filed several unsuccessful lawsuits, and directly attempted to overturn the results at the county, state, and federal level. This culminated in the attack on the United States Capitol, an attempted self-coup, on January 6, 2021, for which Trump was impeached a second time. The day after the attack, Trump stated that a "new administration" would be succeeding his, without mentioning president-elect Biden by name, in a video posted on Twitter.