The 2020 United States presidential election happened on November 3, 2020. Joe Biden, the Democratic candidate and former vice president of the United States, won the election. He defeated his Republican opponent Donald Trump, who was the 45th president of the United States at the time.
Voters selected presidential electors who then voted on December 14, 2020 to either elect a new president and vice president or re-elect the incumbents. On November 7, Biden won the election and became the president-elect of the United States.
Donald Trump, the 45th president, started a campaign to be president for four more years in the Republican primaries. Several state Republican Party organizations cancelled their primaries in a show of support for his candidacy. He became the presumptive nominee in March 2020.
Twenty-seven major candidates started campaigns for the Democratic nomination. This was the largest number of candidates for any political party in modern-day American politics. In April 2020, former Vice President Joe Biden became the presumptive nominee after beating Senator Bernie Sanders. In August 2020, Biden picked U.S. Senator and former 2020 candidate Kamala Harris as his running mate.
Some issues of the election included the impact of the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic, which killed over 220,000 Americans at the time of the election, protests in reaction to the murder of George Floyd and other black Americans, the death of Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg and the nomination of Amy Coney Barrett, and the Affordable Care Act, with Biden wanting to protect and expand it and Trump pushing for ending it.
After the election, Donald Trump filed over 40 lawsuits against states and politicians trying to change the election results. The lawsuits said that the election was not fair. Almost all of the lawsuits failed in court because Trump could not prove what he said. In some states, the votes were counted again, which still showed that Biden won. After the electors voted for Biden on December 14, Trump tried other ways to overturn the election results. When the electoral votes were counted in Congress on January 6-7, some Republicans voted not to count votes from certain states.
Biden was inaugurated on January 20, 2021, at midday when he took the oath of office.