2020 United States presidential election

The 2020 United States presidential election (also known as the COVID election) was held on Tuesday, November 3, 2020, as the incumbent Republican Party idiot (and president) Donald Trump tried to secure his reelection against the Democratic Party candidate and former vice president Joe Biden. This was a highly unusual campaign season, taking place during the COVID-19 pandemic, the associated economic recession, and widespread social unrest. Measures to make voting easier during the pandemic helped 2020 become the highest-turnout election in over a century. Joe Biden defeated Donald Trump by winning the longtime Republican strongholds of Georgia and Arizona alongside the three swing states of the Rust Belt, and he finished with 306 votes in the Electoral College. Biden received 81.3 million votes, breaking the previous record of 69.5 million, which had been set in 2008 by Barack Obama. While Biden crushed Trump by a margin of 7 million in the popular vote, the overall election was extremely close due to razor-thin margins in six states. 
Despite similarly narrow margins and an outright lost popular vote, Trump had called his 2016 victory a landslide. Biden cited that statement to also claim a mandate.
In the lead-up to election season, Trump's presidency melted down into absolute bedlam. A Democratic-controlled House of Representatives ground his agenda to a halt, and Trump's conflict with the House resulted in the longest government shutdown of unprecedented length. Then came a scandal related to his attempts to weaponize the country of Ukraine against his expected opponent, Joe Biden. This resulted in Trump's impeachment by the House, making him the third president in US history to be impeached. Then came the Black Lives Matter protests, the president's unhinged response to the protesters, and the absolute wrecking ball that was the COVID-19 pandemic. His mishandling of the pandemic contributed to unnecessary deaths and worsened the economic crisis.
On the Democratic side, Joe Biden eventually prevailed in the primaries despite hitting stumbling blocks related to the racist skeletons in his closet from his Senate days and allegations of sexual harassment from multiple women. His campaign promises were standard and uninspiring Democratic fare: a better COVID response, expanded Obamacare, criminal justice reform, reversal of Trump's immigration policies, and an emphasis on improving the nation's infrastructure. Instead of proposing any significant policy changes, Biden focused his campaign on a simple "return to normalcy," an end to Trumpian chaos and the ravages of the pandemic. At the time, this appeal was in-tune with the mood of the country. He also mostly eschewed in-person campaigning in favor of a primarily online strategy, becoming the first candidate in American history to do so. An internet-based campaign proved to be an ideal way to market a candidate who was too old to handle the pressures of frequent rallying and door-knocking.
While the polls predicted an absolute stampede of a win for Biden, the actual result was much closer, and the margins were distressingly narrow in the states that mattered. Due to the significantly increased number of mail-in ballots, vote results came in much slower than usual. Election Night was a nail-biter, although it became clear that Biden had an advantage fairly early. Pennsylvania, the decisive state for Biden's victory, wasn't called until over 87 hours after polls closed. 
The unexpected closeness of the election and the unusually-long counting process led to a proliferation of conspiracy theories such as "Voting machines changed/deleted votes for Trump!" or "Election workers threw out bags of ballots!" or the especially-popular "Mail-in ballots were fraudulent!" Trump both promoted and encouraged this response, while personally rejecting the election results and refusing to concede. Behind the scenes, the Trump administration launched an unprecedented legal effort to overturn the election result through methods such as attempting to send fraudulent electors from swing states to vote for him, encouraging Vice President Mike Pence to overrule Congress' certification of the Electoral College results, and even personally calling Georgia's secretary of state to ask him to "find" enough votes to flip the state back to Trump. 
All of this nonsense culminated in the 2021 US coup attempt, in which Trump encouraged his supporters to violently attack the US Capitol building during the Congressional certification of the results on January 6th, 2021. The Capitol attack led to an unprecedented second impeachment for Trump, the trial for which took place after the disgraced president left office. Fuck you, Donald.
==Background==
===The chaos president===
Trump's first term had been a dumpster fire, and the final years and months were the worst yet. The Democratic Party won a comfortable majority in the House of Representatives during the 2018 midterm elections. Confrontation between Trump and Congress over whether the government should spend money on a dumbass border wall resulted in the longest government shutdown in American history in early 2019.
Recognizing Biden as his most credible potential opponent in the lead-up to the election, Trump tried to condition military aid to Ukraine on its president Volodymyr Zelenskyy publicly opening a criminal investigation into Biden's son, who had ties to a Ukrainian energy company. This little bit of attempted ratfuckery got Trump impeached in December 2019, making him the third president in US history to face that sanction. 
In the aftermath of the he promised to greet Black Lives Matter protesters with "the most vicious dogs, and most ominous weapons, I have ever seen." Trump's pledge that, "when the looting starts, the shooting starts," further exacerbated racial tensions.
===Trump's COVID response was a shitshow===
During the COVID-19 pandemic, Trump's poor decisions and idiotic statements were widely blamed for worsening the situation and undermining his own administration's response to the crisis. An October 2020 study from the University of Oxford found that Trump's mishandling of COVID resulted in a 28% greater rate of excess deaths than in Europe and potentially cost more American lives than did American combat fatalities in World War I. Holy shit. 
The thing is, the widely-spread public criticism was an avoidable situation for Trump. Public approval of Trump's pandemic response was initially quite high in March 2020 (60%), during the time in which he declared a national emergency, imposed travel bans, signed a $2 trillion stimulus package, and announced that the federal government would devote all necessary resources to develop a vaccine. By April 2020, however, public approval of Trump's handling of the pandemic dropped by 10%, with a corresponding decrease in his overall job performance rating. This happened when Trump started to publicly question his own administration's health experts and leave the states to their own devices in handling the pandemic. Voters consistently gave higher approval ratings to Democratic governors than either Trump or Republican governors. Meanwhile, Trump was hitting Twitter to say that his supporters should "liberate" Democratic-governed states like Minnesota and Michigan from their pandemic lockdown measures.
After the Black Lives Matter protests started, Trump's job approval dropped to 39% in June, before stabilizing at 42% by August. These are not the healthiest numbers for an incumbent.
COVID also significantly worsened the wealth gap between white Americans and Black Americans, contributing to the rising African-American backlash against Trump. Young Americans and Latino Americans were also disproportionately impacted.
Trump's COVID shitshow finally hit its peak in October 2020, when the president, his wife, and dozens of White House aides came down with the disease.
===...but the pandemic also benefited his campaign===
However, it's a mischaracterization to say that COVID only hurt Trump. He won back a lot of support by vigorously campaigning against unpopular pandemic-era measures, such as prolonged closures of schools and churches, and by quite literally signing off on a round of federal stimulus checks that were sent out to voters. Public health experts further infuriated conservatives by giving the green-light to Black Lives Matter protests despite having recently recommended lockdowns and stay-at-home orders. 
Trump's characterization of lockdown measures as being a "cure worse than the problem itself," resonated with voters who were primarily concerned with how the pandemic response was impacting the economy. Voters who placed the economy as their foremost concern were very likely to vote for Trump, while voters who had public health as their priority didn't have quite the same likelihood of backing Biden. During the election campaign, COVID was also hitting the large blue states (like California and New York) much harder than red states or even swing states, so many voters around the country did not understand or feel the urgency that motivated the lockdown measures. Trump's "economy first" message was a fairly viable strategy for Republicans, as it caused an upsurge in support for them that manifested as an unexpectedly close election night.
Trump was also president during one of the largest expansions of the welfare state in modern American history, spending over $5 trillion on critically-necessary policies like emergency food benefits, free school meals, unemployment benefits, Medicaid expansion, and moratoriums on evictions and foreclosures. The $2 trillion federal stimulus bill that Trump signed in March was the most expensive bill of its kind in US history, and it contained decidedly anti-free market measures compelling manufacturers to produce much-needed medical supplies.
By September, the press were remarking on the "eerie stability" of Trump's approval numbers considering everything that had happened by that point. Although there's a correlation-causation problem, it's probably significant that many of the regions hardest-hit by COVID shifted the most towards Trump during this election.
===Expanded voting rights===
Another unusual aspect of the 2020 election: voting access. Fearing COVID outbreaks at polling places, states across the country passed laws allowing for no-excuse early voting and mail-in voting (with some states sending mail ballots to every voter). All told, a record 76% of American voters were eligible to cast a ballot by mail. 
There were logistical challenges, however. Trump-appointed postmaster general Louis DeJoy had implemented measures to eliminate overtime and late trips, causing a backlog of undelivered mail in the United States Postal Service (USPS). More of the incompetence that typified the Trump administration, although thankfully, DeJoy suspended those policies ahead of the election. In August, Trump said he would not authorize additional resources for the USPS or for states because he personally opposed allowing more people to vote by mail. 
Trump repeatedly attacked the validity of mail-in voting, saying that mail ballots were especially susceptible to voter fraud. He also referred to the practice of third-party ballot deliveries as "ballot harvesting," a practice which is not coincidentally most common among minority voters. His comments came despite the fact that Trump had voted by mail during the 2020 Republican primaries. When pressed on this inconvenient detail, Trump rambled about an imagined scenario where Democrats would pack "thousands and thousands of people" into "somebody's living room" and just fill out countless numbers of ballots. This was stupid for numerous reasons, not the least of which is the fact that nobody then or now has living rooms that can fit thousands of people.
==Democratic nomination==
In 2019, the Democratic Party hoped to redeem itself from that stinging defeat of 2016, in which Hillary Clinton had underperformed to the point that she almost lost Minnesota (a state which has backed the Democratic nominee in every election since 1972), and came within 3,000 votes of losing New Hampshire. Now, though, the opportunity seemed ripe for a Democratic return to the White House, and Clinton was no longer The Chosen One. Hopefuls crowded the primary field, with some decently well-known names like Senators Amy Klobuchar and Elizabeth Warren, some absolute nobodies like and , and a few intriguing options like Ohio populist or the surprisingly successful smooth-talker Pete Buttigieg. There were also a few total jokes, like the insincere and ideologically-inconsistent California Senator Kamala Harris, and Hawaii's Tulsi Gabbard, most known for being supportive of the brutal Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad. 
None of them stood a chance against the two big names: former Vice President Joe Biden and 2016's populist insurgent Bernie Sanders, back for another round. With Biden running a moderate establishment-backed campaign and Sanders still hoping to push the Democrats to the left, the stage seemed set for another climactic showdown between the Democratic establishment and the outsider fighting for the young and the working class. This just didn't happen. Unfortunately for Sanders, the 2020 Democratic electorate was very different from the 2016 electorate. In 2016, many Democrats were hungry for an alternative to the disappointing neoliberal policies of the Obama administration, but 2020 Democrats had the sole objective of finding the candidate most likely to beat Trump. The relatively high level of Democratic interest in unknowns like Buttigieg or showed that the party was looking for a white centrist man who wouldn't be in any way threatening to the broader electorate.
That last bit shouldn't minimize the fact that the Democratic establishment did try their best to screw Sanders, even though their efforts probably weren't necessary. Liberal media outlets like MSNBC and CNN lambasted Sanders as an unelectable radical with toxic supporters, who would lead the Democrats into certain defeat against Trump. The Party also made no effort to hide its antipathy towards Sanders. Party officials were open about the fact that they intended to deny Sanders the nomination even if he arrived at the Convention with the greatest number of delegates, and former president Obama used his influential platform to voice doubts over Sanders' ability to win. 
Biden, meanwhile, had a rough road in the primaries despite taking up Clinton's mantle as the establishment's Chosen One. While he had a great deal of name recognition as Obama's former right-hand man, and he could truthfully say that he had favorable polling against Trump,Joe Biden is the Democrats' best chance to beat Trump in 2020. No other liberal darling even comes close. NBC News. Biden had his own baggage. No less than eight women came forward in 2019 to accuse Biden of touching and kissing them inappropriately.All the Women Who Have Spoken Out Against Joe Biden. The Cut. 12 April 2020. The issue attracted attention, and Biden made an apology video pledging to be "more mindful and respectful of people's personal space."Joe Biden, in Video, Says He Will Be ‘More Mindful’ of Personal Space. New York Times. Former staffer Tara Reade also outright accused him of sexually assaulting her, although media outlets were quick to point out inconsistencies in her story and her previous goodwill towards Biden.Examining Tara Reade’s Sexual Assault Allegation Against Joe Biden. New York Times. April 12, 2020. ‘Manipulative, deceitful, user’: Tara Reade left a trail of aggrieved acquaintances. Politico. During the debates, Kamala Harris attacked him for opposing school integration during his time in the Senate, ‘That little girl was me’: Harris’ attack on Joe Biden steals spotlight at Democratic primary debate. CNN. June 28, 2019. and for naming segregationist Senators Strom Thurmond and Jesse Helms as his personal friends. Biden looked visibly uncomfortable, and he couldn't come up with any good rebuttals.
Biden went on to lose critical early contests in Iowa, New Hampshire, and Nevada.Joe Biden's Long And Rocky Road To The Democratic Nomination. NPR. His campaign looked dead in the water. However, Biden still had one advantage: Black support. He promised his supporters that he would turn things around by winning South Carolina,How Joe Biden Won the White House. Time. and with the help of an endorsement from the state's Representative , he actually did. As Biden racked up more Southern states, his fellow moderates dropped out to clear the field for the Chosen One, and Sanders had no choice but to concede on 7 April and endorse Biden. Bernie Sanders drops out of the 2020 race, clearing Joe Biden’s path to the Democratic nomination. CNN.
Like the primaries, the Democratic National Convention was very different from what had taken place four years before. Due to the pandemic ravaging the country, this Convention was primarily virtual, and Biden gave his acceptance speech in a nearly-empty hall in Delaware.Biden Accepts Nomination: ‘This Is A Life-Changing Election’. NPR. Aug. 20, 2020.
==Campaign issues==
===The pandemic===
What else would have been the top issue of the election? American deaths from the ongoing pandemic hit 223,000 in mid-October, and Biden's attacks on Trump's botching of the crisis became a key theme of his campaign. In September, Biden said Trump "waved the white flag" in surrender to the pandemic, and he then added, "it's almost criminal." While rejecting the idea that he was campaigning "on the false promises of being able to end this pandemic by flipping a switch," Biden did pledge to "let science drive our decisions." Biden's pandemic response plan called for increasing federal funding for vaccine research and expanding testing capabilities, using the full authority of the Defense Production Act to force the manufacturing of more masks and face shields, and the creation of a government task force meant to address minority communities which were being disproportionately impacted by the pandemic due to racial inequality.
Trump, on the other hand, published no action plan to address the pandemic. Instead, Trump insisted that everything would start going back to normal by January with the release of the then-undeveloped vaccine and pledged to hold China "fully accountable" for the spread of the virus. Most of Trump's messaging on COVID was focused on his hysterical warnings that Biden would put the entire country into a pandemic lockdown: "If you vote for Joe Biden it means no kids in school, no graduations, no weddings, no Thanksgivings, no Christmas, and no Fourth of July together." He also mocked Biden for wearing a face mask during the pandemic, and erratically alternated between supporting mask recommendations and opposing them.
A post-election Gallup poll indicated that 58% of voters were either very or somewhat confident in Biden's ability to handle the pandemic, while only 42% said the same about Trump. Biden voters were much harsher on Trump's ability to tackle the crisis than vice versa. While 55% of Trump voters said they had zero confidence in Biden's pandemic-management ability, 86% of Biden voters said the same about Trump.
===The economy===
COVID also threw the economy into chaos, and three months of the pandemic caused unemployment to spike higher than two years of the Great Recession. After hitting a peak of nearly 15%, the national unemployment rate declined to a still-bad 7% in October. The US economy went into a recession and shrank by 3.5%, and overall performance made 2020 the worst year for US economic growth since 1946. With economic decline on voters' minds, Trump capitalized on the situation by warning that lockdowns and similar pandemic measures would cause even more pain to Americans. Much of his economic messaging focused on the need to prematurely reopen the US economy to put people back to work, despite the pandemic still accelerating. Economists meanwhile warned that ending pandemic measures before the virus was brought under control would worsen the impact of the crisis and lead to greater long-term damage to the economy.
Trump also claimed to have built the greatest economy in American history during his pre-pandemic years, but the facts showed that he had inherited the positive economic trends from the late years of the Obama administration and that the economy was most certainly not the greatest in American history. Biden attacked Trump on the economy, saying that Trump "squandered" the "longest economic expansion in history from the Obama-Biden administration." While Trump touted his party's passage of "the biggest tax cuts in American history," data actually showed that the tax cuts disproportionately benefited the wealthiest Americans while middle class income growth slowed during Trump's term. Biden rightly said that Trump's tax cuts for the rich amounted to him "turning his back on the middle class."
While Biden and Trump were both reluctant to say this, the positive economic trends dating from the Obama administration masked a long-term crisis in the American economy. Just looking at economic growth ignored the facts that middle class incomes had been stagnant for decades, overall employment and wages had been outright declining for many years, rates of upward mobility had also been declining for many years, and racial disparities were worsening. Trump repeatedly pointing out high numbers on the stock market ignored the fact that the stock market has very little impact on the economic lives of the middle and lower class. Biden's touting of the Obama administration's supposedly great economy ignored the fact that widespread disillusionment with stagnation and the inadequate response to the aftermath of the Great Recession is one of the reasons that Trumpism and 2016's populist backlash happened in the first place.
===Racial unrest and protests===
On 25 May, 2020, Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin murdered George Floyd, a Black man, by kneeling on his neck while other police officers looked on. This crime was captured on video, and it set the match to the long-building powder keg of racial resentment in America. The resultant Black Lives Matter protests were one of the largest mass movements in American history, with between 15 and 26 million people estimated to have taken part in actions across the nation. Only 4% of the protests turned violent, and said violence was frequently instigated by police and counter-protesters. Unfortunately, the widespread nature of the protests meant that violent incidents resulted in a combined total of over 1$ billion in damage, the most expensive fallout from civil unrest in American history.
Trump's response was unhinged. Along with calling protesters "thugs" and threatening them with "vicious dogs" and "ominous weapons," the president threatened to send in the military to quell the protests. Trump also took advantage of the moment to spread fear and paranoia among his supporters to drive up turnout, including by sending a mass text message baselessly claiming that Antifa would "attack your homes if Joe's elected. Pres Trump needs you..." All of this combined sparked a new era of white conservative backlash against civil rights movements in the line of what the United States experienced during the late 1960s.
During this period, Biden knelt with protesters in Georgia, and he condemned Trump for encouraging brutality and spreading division. Biden placed particular emphasis on an incident where Trump ordered riot police to clear out protesters from a church near the White House so that Trump could pose with a Bible.
Racial unrest also swept up Asian-American communities as well. Inflammatory rhetoric from the president tying Asians to the ongoing pandemic, such as "China virus" and "Kung Flu," resulted in a sharp uptick in online hate directed at Asian-Americans. Anti-Asian hate crimes increased by nearly 150% in 2020, with most incidents happening in New York City and Los Angeles, which are cities with high Asian-American populations.
===Immigration policy===
One of Trump's biggest areas of focus as president during his first term was immigration, and specifically his efforts to limit it. This was only to be expected considering his emphasis on the issue in 2016. While deportation rates didn't change much, he did vastly increase rates of detentions and decrease admissions for refugees (especially Muslims). Quite a few of his policies were tied up in federal court, while his wall and his pledge to deport millions never materialized. 
Despite being fairly ineffectual when it came to "Build the Wall", the Trump administration did earn widespread outrage due to its "zero tolerance" policy of separating children from their parents after they illegally crossed the border as a means of deterring further crossings. Detention facilities were dangerously overcrowded, and a 2019 report from an inspection by the Department of Homeland Security contained some absolutely insane quotes like, "children at three of the five border patrol facilities we visited had no access to showers," or "cells smelled of what might have been unwashed bodies/body odour, urine, untreated diarrhea, and/or soiled clothing/diapers." 
During the election campaign, Biden's team released a 22-page position paper outlining his plan to "immediately end Trump's assault on the dignity of immigrant communities" and "restore our moral standing in the world and our historic role as a safe haven for refugees and asylum-seekers." Some of his most significant promises were to halt construction on Trump's wall, focus on reuniting families separated under Trump's policies, and limit raids by Immigration and Customs Enforcement. In regards to the detention centers, Biden pledged to begin scaling them back and ending the privately-run facilities, but he never did either.
===Healthcare===
In a Gallup poll from August 2020, healthcare rated as the second most-important issue for voters (68% "very important") behind the economy (79%), while the COVID outbreak actually ranked fourth (62%). During the campaign, Trump stuck to his failed pledge to "repeal and replace" the Affordable Care Act while promoting the program to get people on private insurance rather than public. Nothing new, in other words.
Healthcare was much more divisive for the Democrats. Like Hillary Clinton before him, Biden opposed Medicare-for-All and even pledged to veto it should a bill ever reach his desk. The pandemic did not change Biden's mind. However, Biden did promise a so-called "Bidencare" policy, which would create a public insurance plan which would be sold on Obamacare's marketplaces. 
The public option promise, of course, went completely unmentioned once Biden won.
===Acceptance of election results===
Trump's attacks on mail-in voting (which people became dependent on due to the COVID-19 pandemic), as well as his repeated refusal to confirm that he would accept defeat,Feuer, Will, President Trump won’t agree to accept 2020 election results as Biden leads in polls — ‘I have to see’, CNBC. 19 July 2020 sparked widespread fears that if he was defeated, he would reject the results and resort to a variety of extraordinary measures to remain in power.Chang, Alvin, Timeline: what a normal US election looks like and what might happen in 2020, The Guardian. 
Though most Congressional Republicans dismissed such a scenario,Bade, Rachel, Kane, Paul, and Itkowitz, Colby, What Senate Republicans are saying after Trump refused to commit to an orderly transfer of power, Washington Post. 24 September 2020. nothing about the GOP's behavior over the past four years suggested they wouldn't just shut up and comply with Trump. Some Republican politicians dropped less-than-subtle hints about their plans to follow the Dear Leader and disregard electoral norms, with Utah Senator Mike Lee openly tweeting, "[w]e're not a democracy", and "[d]emocracy isn't the objective..." Trump himself doubled down, declaring that "the only way we're going to lose this election is if this election is rigged."Liptak, Kevin, Trump warns of 'rigged election' as he uses conspiracy and fear to counter Biden's convention week, CNN. 18 August 2020.
Just months before the election, the FBI director rejected Trump's claims that voter fraud was a legitimate concern, testifying to Congress that, "We have not seen, historically, any kind of coordinated national voter fraud effort in a major election, whether it’s by mail or otherwise."
===Other issues===
*The Supreme Court: Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg died just 45 days before the election, and the prospect of another Trump-appointed justice on the Court galvanized Democratic donors. Despite the closeness to the election, Senate Republicans forced through Trump's nominee with the closest confirmation vote in American history. Despite fury from Democrats, Biden avoided discussing how or whether he would attempt to reform the Court.
*Climate change and the "Green New Deal": During the first Biden-Trump debate, Trump said he believed "to an extent" in the evidence that human greenhouse gas emissions are contributing to global warming, but he pledged to continue his administration's pro-fossil fuel policies. While Biden said he would not follow or support the Green New Deal plan put forward by progressive Democrats, his $2 trillion climate plan was designed with significant input from progressives.
==The campaign trail==
===The Trump campaign: what an absolute shitshow===
Within hours of his inauguration, Trump filed paperwork with the Federal Election Commission to run for reelection, and he announced his reelection campaign no less than five times during his term. He never stopped campaigning, and instead turned the permanent campaign into a core element of his presidency.
Of course, things weren't going to be so easy for Trump. He's just naturally better at campaigning offensively and presenting himself as an outsider politician; being the incumbent president forced him to defend his job performance while removing much of his outsider mystique. Sure enough, his reelection campaign was almost comically bad. His early campaign kickoffs seemed to have paid dividends in the form of a $1.6 billion cash advantage, but the Trump team managed to through most of that cash before the proper election season had even started. Trump's team was divided by finger-pointing, complaining, and "an atmosphere of paranoia." Republican political consultant furiously said in October that, "I've never seen a campaign more mis-calibrated than the Trump campaign. Frankly, his staff ought to be brought up on charges of political malpractice," after noting the fact that the campaign's closing message was focusing more on Hunter Biden than on issues voters actually gave a shit about. Discord between Trump's staffers and the increasingly distressed Republican National Committee grew to the point where communication between them broke down, and the RNC decided to run its own advertisements without consulting with Trump's people.
In 2019, pundits widely noted that Trump had no real policy proposals for his second term and had presented basically no vision for what that term would look like or why he was even seeking it. The Republican Party didn't even publish a platform, instead opting to swear loyalty to Trump's whims and re-publish its 2016 platform—in the process making it clear that much of the 2016 platform had not been realized by the Trump administration.
Not to mention, Trump was also his usual deranged self on the campaign trail. Some of his greatest hits include "We'll have to get rid of the ballots" to ensure a peaceful transfer of power to himself, or saying the US is more corrupt and harder to deal with than Russia and North Korea, or suggesting that Biden was a pedophile who wanted to "destroy suburbia" while taking performance-enhancing drugs. Trump also decided that it would be a good idea to campaign against pop star for some reason (no, really) and promoted a conspiracy theory that the United States never actually killed Osama Bin Laden. He even praised QAnon.
Of course, Trump's biggest liability was COVID. While he was able to turn it around somewhat by campaigning against lockdowns, the undeniable fact was that Trump had botched the pandemic response and most voters knew it. After being warned about the issue in February by his staffers, Trump reportedly snapped, "This fucking virus, what does it have to do with me getting reelected?" As it turned out, quite a bit. He stuck his head in the sand by insisting that testing less for the virus would make the problem go away and then laughably listing "ending the COVID-19 pandemic" as one of his achievements in October. His mixed-messaging on face masks was noted and criticized, and a Stanford University study came out in late October indicating that Trump's packed campaign rallies (during a pandemic!) had directly caused more than 700 deaths. 
Trump's insistence that COVID wasn't as devastating as it was, combined with his ineffective response and catching the virus himself, all presented the image of an incompetent jackass who didn't give a damn about the defining issue of the day. And, of course, that image was reality. Fuck you, Donald.
===The Biden campaign: playing it safe and promising normalcy===
100 years ago in the year 1920, Warren G. Harding won the presidency by focusing his campaign message on a return to "normalcy" after the chaos of the Woodrow Wilson administration, the , and American intervention in World War I. In 2020, Biden's strategy was very similar: promising to heal the country after a period of unrest marked by an asshole incumbent and a deadly pandemic. 
Consistently leading in the polls, Biden decided to play it safe. While Republicans mocked him for "hiding in his basement" and Democrats fretted, Biden ran a primarily virtual campaign, the first of its kind. Instead of holding in-person rallies, Biden appeared on news channels and talk shows while appearing regularly on a podcast he launched to speak directly to voters. Biden presented himself as a steady and sober hand that would restore trust in America, and much of his strategy focused on allowing Trump the airtime and national prominence to shoot himself in the foot.
Of course, Biden didn't just sit on his ass; there were things he actively got right. While Biden stuck to a moderate tone during the election, he did assemble a series of "unity task forces" with supporters of Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren. While Medicare-for-All didn't make it into the recommendations, the task forces did get Biden to pledge to some significant progressive policies such as net-zero greenhouse gas emissions by 2050, the creation of a postal banking system to expand banking access for low-income families, banning for-profit charter schools, and establishing universal prekindergarten for 3- and 4-year-olds. Biden learned from the mistakes of Hillary Clinton and made an affirmative case for himself instead of simply bashing Trump, and he made an effort to reach out to progressives and unite the Democrats. 
One of his best moves was emphasizing compassion at a moment when the country felt uncertain and afraid. Biden emphasized his personal background—losing his first wife and baby daughter in a 1972 car accident and his son to cancer in 2015—to emphasize that he personally understood the losses people were experiencing due to COVID. He created solemn videos mourning COVID death milestones in a stark contrast to Trump's indifference and repeated golfing trips during the same period. After the police murder of George Floyd and the subsequent protests, Biden recorded a video which was played at Floyd's funeral offering his condolences. Presenting Biden as a kind man in contrast to Trump's cruelty created an affirmative argument in favor of voting for him, and it resonated with a large portion of American voters during a time of suffering. In the end, Biden's slow strategy of presenting caution and compassion to the nation paid off.
==Results==
On Election Night, it became clear that something had gone terribly wrong. Trump's strategy of stoking fears that Biden would introduce more lockdown measures and thereby destroy the economy resulted in a higher-than-expected level of support for the president, and the election came down to just a handful of states despite polls indicating an easy victory for Biden. Due to the large number of mail-in ballots and the archaic rules for processing them, votes were counted slowly. The morning after the election, Trump was ahead by 13% in Pennsylvania with 64% of the vote counted and 6% in Michigan with 77% of the vote counted. While the so-called "red mirage" of an early lead for Trump was expected and predictable, it was a strong sign that Trump's 2016 victories in the Rust Belt were no fluke. After a tense waiting period lasting several days, Biden's victory was confirmed on November 7 after Pennsylvania finally processed enough of its mail-in ballots to reveal the outcome. 
The satisfying result was that Trump became the 11th president in American history to lose reelection. Biden won five of Trump's 2016 states: Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, Michigan, Georgia, and Arizona. On the other hand, Trump's easy victories in Ohio, Iowa, and Florida cemented those three states' transformations from swing states into Republican strongholds.
2020 saw the greatest turnout of the 21st century, the greatest number of votes cast in American history up to that point, and the highest Asian-American turnout ever recorded up to that point. In terms of the popular vote, Biden won 51.3% against Trump's 46.8%, a margin of over 7 million votes. However, the swing states were much more Republican-leaning than the country as a whole, and Trump's resultant advantage in the Electoral College was the largest advantage any party has had since 1948. Back in 2016, Trump won the three states that put him over the top in the Electoral College by a combined 77,744 votes, while Biden won his three closest critical states by just 42,844 votes. Thanks to the USA's weird-ass election system, Biden won by more than Trump and less than Trump at the same time.
Biden's victory was driven by turnout: relatively few counties flipped from one party to other between 2016 and 2020, but Biden generally increased his support from most Democratic regions compared to Clinton's election performance. Many of his largest improvements over Clinton came from suburban counties, especially those around Atlanta and Philadelphia. While Biden won a higher percentage of the white vote than Clinton in 2016 (a deficit of 17% compared to 20%), he lost ground with the major nonwhite voting cohorts. In Arizona and Georgia, for example, Biden won by sharply increasing his share of the white vote despite both states' racial diversity and what you would usually expect from a Democrat's performance. The loss in minority support was severe: compared to Clinton, Biden lost 8 points with Latino voters and lost 3 points with Black voters. In summary, Biden's victory was nice to have, but it showed ominous signs for the Democratic Party's future.
===Table===
All candidates who received over 1% of the popular vote.
Candidate 	Electoral vote	Popular vote	States carried 	Percentage
Joe Biden 	306 	81,283,501 	25 + DC + Nebraska-2	51.3%
Donald Trump	232 	74,223,975 	25 + Maine-2 	46.8%
Jo Jorgensen	0 	1,865,535 	0 	1.18%
===Maps===
File:ElectoralCollege2020.svg|Electoral College votes from each state and the District of Columbia.
File:2020 United States presidential election results map by county.svg|Results by county, shaded by the winner's vote share. 
File:2020 U.S. presidential election margins.svg|Results by margin of victory in each state.
File:U.S. 2016 to 2020 presidential election swing.svg|Swing in county margins from 2020 to 2024. Some of the starkest shifts happened in Hispanic regions.
===Close states===
States where the margin of victory was under 1%:
# Georgia, 0.23% (11,779 votes) – 16 electoral votes
# Arizona, 0.31% (10,457 votes) – 11 electoral votes
# Wisconsin, 0.63% (20,682 votes) – 10 electoral votes (tipping-point state)
States where the margin of victory was between 1% and 5%:
# Pennsylvania, 1.16% (80,555 votes) – 20 electoral votes
# North Carolina, 1.35% (74,483 votes) – 15 electoral votes
# Nevada, 2.39% (33,596 votes) – 6 electoral votes
# Michigan, 2.78% (154,188 votes) – 16 electoral votes
# Florida, 3.36% (371,686 votes) – 29 electoral votes
States/districts where the margin of victory was between 5% and 10%:
# Texas, 5.58% (631,221 votes) – 38 electoral votes
# Nebraska's 2nd congressional district, 6.50% (22,091 votes) – 1 electoral vote
# Minnesota, 7.11% (233,012 votes) – 10 electoral votes
# New Hampshire, 7.35% (59,267 votes) – 4 electoral votes
# Maine's 2nd congressional district, 7.44% (27,996 votes) – 1 electoral vote
# Ohio, 8.03% (475,669 votes) – 18 electoral votes
# Iowa, 8.20% (138,611 votes) – 6 electoral votes
# Maine, 9.07% (74,335 votes) – 2 electoral votes
==Aftermath==
===Trump's post-election meltdown===
The day after the election took place, Trump falsely declared victory even though the swing states were still counting votes and neither candidate had reached the threshold to be elected yet. During Election Night and the days after, the president posted a desperate and unhinged flurry of Tweets claiming victory and claiming that votes were being "illegally" counted past Election Night to deny him that victory. 
Despite everything, Trump had begun Election Day convinced that he would defeat Joe Biden. Fearful of telling the president bad news, his campaign team encouraged that confidence and encouraged him to believe that he was winning the election even after the results made clear that he was losing. He arrived back at the White House from his watch party in the early hours of the morning, looking tired and haggard, but his tiredness turned to rage after watching Fox News call the Republican stronghold of Arizona for Biden. In the days afterwards, Trump refused to concede and alternated between despondence and anger. 
Trump's family members, including his son-in-law Jared Kusher, privately approached the president to urge him to at least write a concession speech, but the president rebuffed them. Multiple national-level Republicans condemned Trump's denial of the results and publicly called on him to concede. Despite the utter lack of evidence and many Republican officials speaking to the contrary, half of Republican voters believed the election was rigged.Half of Republicans say Biden won because of a 'rigged' election: Reuters/Ipsos poll by Chris Kahn (November 18, 2020 3:05 AM) Reuters.
In the days following the election, after it became clear that his refusal to concede was just a giant fit of childishness, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff General Mark Milley became increasingly alarmed that Trump would attempt stage a self-coup similar to what Hitler did on March 23, 1933 (a "Reichstag moment" in Milley's words).Joint Chiefs chairman feared potential ‘Reichstag moment’ aimed at keeping Trump in power by Reis Thebault (July 14, 2021) The Washington Post.'They're not going to f**king succeed': Top generals feared Trump would attempt a coup after election, according to new book by Jamie Gangel et al. (July 14, 2021) CNN.Germany 1933: From democracy to dictatorship Anne Frank House. This was prescient on the part of Milley because Trump did attempt to stage a self-coup on January 6, 2021, and Milley took steps preceding the coup to assure that Trump would not be able to seize control of the military if a coup attempt did happen. This is one of those rare cases when a Nazi analogy is valid.
===Time-wasting lawsuits from Trump's legal team===
While Trump publicly demanded that states stop counting votes, he privately raged at his legal team for failing to successfully challenge the ongoing count in court. The subsequent weeks and months would give the president a plethora of new reasons to be disappointed with his lawyers. 
On November 8, the president's legal team led by Rudy Giuliani held a press conference to explain their legal strategy to supporters and the press. While it was supposed to take place at the luxury Four Seasons hotel in Philadelphia, a farcical mix-up led to the conference being held at Four Seasons Total Landscaping, a suburban business situated between a crematorium and an erotica bookstore. Sometimes truth really is stranger than fiction. 
By early December, Trump's lawyers filed and promptly lost over 50 legal challenges to the election result. Trump's own appointees were among the judges tossing his cases. On December 4, Trump's team hilariously had cases dismissed in six states on the same day. One of the most strongly-worded opinions came from a conservative judge in Wisconsin: "The relief being sought by the petitioners is the most dramatic invocation of judicial power I have ever seen. Judicial acquiescence to such entreaties built on so flimsy a foundation would do indelible damage to every future election." 
A challenge to Pennsylvania's result made it to the Supreme Court on December 8, and the Court unanimously issued a one sentence order refusing to consider the case. A few days later, another case reached SCOTUS. This time, it came from Texas Attorney General , who convinced no less than 18 other Republican state attorneys general and 126 Republican members of Congress to sign on to his Texas v. Pennsylvania case seeking to throw out the results in Biden's four closest-won states. On December 12, the Court issued a 7-2 judgement that Texas had no legal standing to sue. Trump reacted with his characteristic whining: "The Supreme Court has really let us down. No Wisdom, No Courage!"
This all happened for good reason: his legal team were morons (and the president moreso). The lawsuits were based on no evidence, and while Biden's victory was decided by tens of thousands of votes, the lawsuits focused on small-potatoes technical issues that had no chance of changing those tens of thousands of votes. While the president's legal team spoke of a rigged election in public, they changed their tune in court to avoid sounding like absolute lunatics before the justice system.
===More attempts to overturn the results===
Trump's campaign against the forces of reality were not limited to mere lawsuits. He also abused the powers of his office by mounting a public pressure campaign against Republican officials in the swing states to encourage them to interfere with the results directly. The president was directly involved. Trump personally made phone calls to two Republican members of the Wayne County Board of Canvassers, urging them to unilaterally throw out the results from this majority-Black county in Michigan. Trump then held a meeting in the White House with Michigan's state Senate Majority Leader Mike Shirkey and House Speaker Lee Chatfield, but he failed to convince them to participate in his attempts to deny the will of Michigan's voters.
Trump also set his sights on Georgia, demanding that its Republican governor use "emergency powers" to block the certification of the results and then call a special legislative session to name a slate of Republican electors. Ever the moaning bitch, Trump responded to Kemp's refusals by taking to social media to call him an "obstructionist who refuses to admit that we won Georgia, BIG!" before trying to order Kemp to resign. Trump also made a phone call to Georgia's Secretary of State, Brad Raffensperger, to command him to "find 11,780 votes, which is one more than we have." Raffensperger refused, not eager to commit actual election fraud and get himself arrested. 
===The "fake electors" plot===
The real point behind Trump's interference with state certifications was to enable the Trump administration's illegal plot to send un-elected individuals to the Electoral College from states that Biden won to vote for Trump on behalf of those states. This plot originated the day after Trump's defeat, first outlined by Wisconsin lawyer and Trump campaign attorney (yes, the Wisconsin guy's name was Cheese Bro).
Under federal law, December 8 was the "safe harbor" deadline for states to certify their election results and confirm the electors that they will send to the Electoral College. If the safe harbor deadline was not met, Republicans argued, then Congress could consider "alternate" slates of electors. All of the legal challenges and all of the phone calls and meetings described above were part of a strategy to delay the certification of the election results. Chesebro's idea was that Republican-controlled state legislatures could unilaterally appoint electors for Trump in defiance of the will of the voters and then demand that Congress count those electors. Trump held an in-person meeting with Chesbro in the Oval Office about implementing this plan.
Trump supporters in seven Biden-won states submitted phony electoral vote certificates to Congress, none of which contained any indication that the electors listed had not been chosen by the states' voters. Luckily, all seven swing states went ahead and certified Biden's electoral college victory by the deadline, refusing to participate in this illegal and far-fetched scheme. At this point, it was clear that the fake electors plot had failed. But Trump's and Chesebro still had one last-ditch plan...
===January 6th coup attempt===
In a meeting on December 16 after the states certified the election results, Chesebro falsely told Trump that it was still possible to overturn the election because fake electors in six states had held their own ceremonies to vote for Trump, filling the president with false hope and more anger. This began a sustained pressure campaign on Vice President Mike Pence, as Trump and his team believed that Pence could theoretically use the administration's undermining of the election result as an excuse to throw out Electoral College votes from states that Biden won while presiding over Congress' formalization of the results on January 6th. Pence, of course, did not actually have this power. 
An increasingly unhinged Trump tweeted about Pence throughout January 5th with statements like "If Vice President @Mike_Pence comes through for us, we will win the Presidency," or "All Mike Pence has to do is send them back to the States, AND WE WIN! Do it Mike, this is a time for extreme courage!" In the lead-up to January 6th, Texas Representative Louie Gohmert ("The Dumbest Guy in Congress") even sued Mike Pence to claim that the Vice President had the ability to overturn the election results; this was immediately laughed out of court.Order of Dismissal for Gohmert v. Pence. 
Meanwhile, Trump announced plans to hold a protest event at the Capitol during the formalization proceedings, writing "Be there, will be wild!" on Twitter. The protest organizers collaborated with extremist hate groups like the Proud Boys and the Oath Keepers. On January 6th, Trump spoke to his gathered supporters near the Capitol, telling them to "fight like hell" and again saying that, "All Vice President Pence has to do is send it back to the states to recertify and we become president and you are the happiest people." 
Incited by their president, Trump's supporters violently stormed the Capitol building in an attempt to prevent the confirmation of Biden's victory. In the process, they assaulted police officers, resulting in the death of one officer and serious injuries for others. Police shot rioter Ashli Babbitt while she was attempting to climb through a broken window. Mike Pence spent the afternoon in hiding within the building while Trump tweeted that "Mike Pence didn't have the courage to do what should have been done," and protesters screamed "Hang Mike Pence!" outside with a makeshift gallows. 
After the trashed and vandalized building was cleared, Congress reconvened and Pence presided over the confirmation of Biden's victory. 
In the wake of the coup attempt, Twitter suspended Trump's account on the basis that company rules forbade someone from using their account to incite and encourage an attack on the United States. Who knew? The House of Representatives also impeached Trump for an unprecedented second time, and a majority of Senators (57, including 7 Republicans) voted to convict Trump. Unfortunately, 57 fell short of the 67 needed to convict Trump and prevent him from holding office ever again.
==Election denial conspiracy theories (and why they were stupid)==
Before and after his loss,Trump has longstanding history of calling elections 'rigged' if he doesn’t like the results by Terrance Smith (November 11, 2020, 2:24 AM) ABC News.RNC 2020: Trump warns Republican convention of ‘rigged election’ (25 August 2020) BBC News. Donald Trump claimed the 2020 election was rigged against him. He largely pushed this objectively false,The Times Called Officials in Every State: No Evidence of Voter Fraud by Nick Corasaniti et al. (Published Nov. 10, 2020; Updated Nov. 19, 2020) The New York Times. conspiracy theory by rage and despair tweeting on Twitter.Trump has amplified voting falsehoods in over 300 tweets since election night. by Linda Qiu (Nov. 16, 2020, 3:44 p.m. ET) The New York Times.Trump lost. But his Twitter feed keeps giving supporters false hope. by Glenn Kessler (November 13, 2020 at 12:00 a.m. PST) The Washington Post. 
Many of the false claims were initially propagated by Russell J. Ramsland Jr. with his company Allied Security Operations Group. Ramsland tried unsuccessfully to push similar false claims in 2018, but at that time no candidate took his bait.The making of a myth: Russell J. Ramsland Jr. sold everything from Tex-Mex food to light-therapy technology. Then he sold the story that the 2020 election was stolen from Trump. by Emma Brown et al. (May 9, 2021) The Washington Post. In 2020, the false claims were incorporated into failed lawsuits by Trump lawyer Sidney Powell, and by Trump surrogates (Louie Gohmert and Rudy Giuliani).
Some of the most popular fraud claims included:
==="Dead people voted!"===
Trump supporters across the country alleged that states received and processed votes from dead people, claiming that this was ironclad proof of either widespread voter fraud or an impending zombie outbreak. In reality, those Trump supporters just had a bad case of the stupids. The supposed "dead voters" were either found alive or were confirmed to be dead people who had remained in their graves as expected. 
State election officials regularly check death records, make note of obituaries, and coordinate with motor vehicle departments to track canceled driver’s licenses all to make sure that dead people don't vote. Quite a lot of work goes into this process. If a dead person is accidentally sent a mail ballot, and then it gets sent back, safeguards such as signature verifications are employed during the processing of mail ballots. 
Quite a few people made clowns of themselves due to this false claim. Tucker Carlson of Fox News had to apologize on-air to a 96 year-old woman for accusing her of voting for her dead husband. The Trump campaign, after investing a great deal of money and effort, hilariously produced a report in 2023 disproving claims that dead people voted.
==="Poll challengers were not allowed to watch ballot counts!"===
Elections allow a certain number of challengers into counting areas to watch ballot counters. In Detroit, for example, MAGA supporters claimed they were being denied their right to watch the count. In reality, they were kept out because the number of challengers (Democrat and Republican alike) had already been met and those individuals were already inside the building.
This claim also made it to federal court when Trump's legal team filed a lawsuit against Pennsylvania Secretary of State Kathy Boockvar and the boards of elections of six counties claiming that their observers were unable to stand close enough to watch workers count mail and absentee ballots. The nonsensical 86-page brief primarily cited unverified news and social media reports, and the case was laughed out of court (and then the appeals court) not even a month later.
==="Votes were deleted!"===
Donny used Twitter to claim that deleted 2.7 million votes. The U.S. Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency () and the National Association of State Election Directors () refuted that claim. According to a statement from those organizations, "there is no evidence that any voting system deleted or lost votes, changed votes, or was in any way compromised".JOINT STATEMENT FROM ELECTIONS INFRASTRUCTURE GOVERNMENT COORDINATING COUNCIL & THE ELECTION INFRASTRUCTURE SECTOR COORDINATING EXECUTIVE COMMITTEES The Washington Post examined this claim by reviewing voter data in 10 key swing states, comparing the vote count of counties that used Dominion machines with the vote count of counties that did not. The results were similar: Trump won 81% counties that used Dominion (compared to 79% of those that did not), and Biden won approximately 51% of the votes in counties that used Dominion, compared to a little over 50% in counties that did not. Nothing in these numbers suggests that any fraud took place."Swing-state counties that used Dominion voting machines mostly voted for Trump" by Philip Bump, Washington Post, 2020 Dec 1
Fox News also had a role in amplifying false claims about Dominion Voting Systems, and the company sued them for defamation in March 2021, seeking $1.6 billion. The ensuing legal proceedings exposed embarrassing internal exchanges showing that various network hosts like Tucker Carlson and Laura Ingraham privately disbelieved the claims and disparaged Trump's lawyers as being "complete nut[s]". In 2023, the network settled with Dominion for $787.5 million.
==="Hugo Chavez rigged the election!"===
In a stunning moment of stupid brilliance, Trump's lawyers held a press conference where they claimed, on live television, that the ballot machines Dominion used were actually from Venezuela and made "at the direction" of former Venezuelan president Hugo Chavez, who had been dead and buried for over seven years.Linda Qiu, How Sidney Powell inaccurately cited Venezuela’s elections as evidence of U.S. fraud. The New York Times, 19 November 2020. Behind the scenes, Trump once again raged at his legal team, this time because even he thought that the Venezuela claim was too fucking stupid to present with a straight face. Sidney Powell, the lawyer in question who most heavily signal-boosted these claims, was the former attorney of Michael Flynn and had also promoted QAnon. 
Humiliated by her antics, Trump's legal team announced they had dumped Powell on 23 November and that she totally didn't really have that much to do with them anyways (yeah, right). Her subsequent court filings, which she made despite no longer representing the Trump campaign, were littered with elementary misspellings (including two completely different misspellings of "district" on the header) and formatting issues (including failing to add spacing between words).Tony Aarons, Ex-Trump Lawyer Sidney Powell Files Election Suits in ‘DISTRCOICT’ Court Bloomberg, 26 November 2020.
On January 8, 2021, Dominion Voting Systems responded to this bullshit by suing Powell for seeking damages of $1.3 billion."Sidney Powell Sued by Dominion for $1.3 Billion Over Vote-Fraud Claims" by Erik Larson, Bloomberg, 2021 January 8 On February 4, another voting software company that was also mentioned heavily in the baseless fraud claims, responded to this bullshit as well by filing a $2.7 billion defamation lawsuit against not only Powell, but Rudy Giuliani, Fox News and three of the network's hosts: Lou Dobbs and Voting software maker "Smartmatic sues Fox News and its anchors for $2.7 billion" by Stephen Battaglio, Los Angeles Times, 2021 February 4
==="Trump won the bellwethers!"===
Trump's supporters have cited the fact that Trump managed to win 18 out of 19 counties that have voted for the winner of the presidency since 1980. However, correlation does not imply causation; these counties and states just happened to have been on a streak (the most impressive being Valencia County, NM, which has voted with the winner in every election from 1952 to 2016). As any smart gambler will say, improbable streaks sometimes happen and they always come to an end. 
FiveThirtyEight argued that these bellwethers fell because their demographics had become whiter and less educated than the national electorate as a whole. In fact, they noted that a dramatic shift occurred in 2016, when 16 of the counties that were bellwethers beginning in 1980 broke their streaks and voted for Hillary Clinton; those counties were more diverse and educated, the types of voters that broke heavily for Clinton. While in the ones that Trump won, he managed to win them by higher margins than the national popular vote (unlike Barack Obama, who won them much closer to his popular vote numbers). While they voted for the winners, it's inaccurate to say that those counties led the candidate to win, as their previous performances are not predictive of future results.
Additionally, Trump and his supporters have falsely claimed that no presidential winner in history has lost both Florida and Ohio. This is once again not true; John F. Kennedy won his election in 1960 while losing the Sunshine and Buckeye states to Richard Nixon.
==Concurrent elections==
===House of Representatives===
The day after the election, House Democrats were stunned to find dozens of races still uncalled with zero Republican incumbents ousted. The day before, Majority Leader Nancy Pelosi had been boasting about this golden opportunity to expand their majority and potentially kick over a dozen Republicans out of the House. The exact opposite happened. Republicans flipped 13 seats from the Democrats, bringing the Democratic majority down to a narrow 222 seats compared to 213 Republicans. 
There were some key takeaways. Polls overestimated House Democrats about as much as they had overestimated Biden, and Trump being on the ballot had driven turnout from low-propensity voters who bolstered the Republicans in the House as well. Additionally, the Republican effort to recruit political outsiders who were women and minorities to run in House races paid off big; all of the 13 seats Republicans flipped from Democrats were won by candidates recruited this way. And while House Democrats rolled their eyes at Republican attack ads accusing them of being socialists and "defund the police" radicals, the ads were convincing to enough voters in enough races to cause this result. The biggest reason Democrats underperformed, though, was the base's lack of interest in the House. While House Republicans received 1.4 million fewer votes than Trump, House Democrats received 3.9 million fewer votes than Biden.
In the aftermath of this result, some Democrats started to wonder if the party could maintain itself if it was having so much trouble communicating with working class voters. Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez criticized her fellow House Democrats for running complacent campaigns and failing to invest in online advertising, and she also noted that every candidate who endorsed Medicare-for-All won their elections.
===Senate===
Results from the Senate were a mixed bag for Democrats. On one hand, Democrats Ossoff and Warnock flipped two Republican Senate seats in the longtime Republican stronghold of Georgia during two runoffs in 2021. Former astronaut and all-around badass Mark Kelly also flipped a seat from the Republicans in Arizona. On the other hand, this only left the Democrats with 50 seats against the Republicans' 50 seats, a nearly unworkable majority that would require constant tiebreaking votes from Vice President Kamala Harris.
Despite the impressive results from Georgia, the Senate was overall a disappointment for Democrats. With bad Senate maps in 2022 and 2024, 2020 was the Democrats' last chance in a long time to win a workable majority. There were some major failures behind this. Despite representing a reliably blue state and polling behind her competitor, Senator Susan Collins won reelection by a large margin in a major disappointment for Democrats. 
Democrats also fumbled the Senate race in North Carolina despite consistent polling leads because their candidate Cal Cunningham was exposed as an adulterer after sexually explicit text messages leaked to the press. Republican Thom Tillis won in North Carolina by a very narrow margin of 1.8%. Cheating on your wife isn't cool, Cal.
Also, Democratic Senator Doug Jones lost his race in Alabama after defeating the pedophile Roy Moore in a 2017 special election, but we'll give him a pass for that one since that was always going to be an unwinnable race in the absence of another historic Republican scandal. The Democratic pickup in Colorado is also barely worth mentioning for the same reason: the Republican incumbent was just never going to win in this overwhelmingly Democratic state.
==See also==
*2020 Democratic Party presidential nomination
*2016 United States presidential election 
*2022 midterm elections
*2024 United States presidential election
*Fun:Socialism with Biden characteristics
*Gerontocracy
==External links==
* New York Times - An Extremely Detailed Map of the 2020 Election
* Childish Gambino - This Is America
==Notes==
==References==
 
Category:Conspiracy theories
Category:COVID-19
Category:Denialism
Category:Pseudostatistics
Category:Government incompetence
Category:Joe Biden
Category:Trumpism
Category:United States politics
Category:U.S. Presidential campaigns