Biden Wins the 2020 US Election as Trump Refuses to Concede

Originally published 2020-11-07.

Joe Biden won the 2020 US presidential election on Saturday, 7 November 2020, when the major American news organisations projected that his lead in Pennsylvania put him past the 270 electoral votes needed to win. Kamala Harris, his running mate, became the first woman elected vice-president. Donald Trump did not concede. Instead he claimed, without evidence, that the election had been stolen and promised to fight the result in court.

That short summary answers the question most people were asking that weekend. The weeks that followed, however, turned an ordinary election result into one of the most tested in American history, and they explain a great deal about US politics since.

How Biden reached 270 electoral votes

American presidents are not chosen directly by the national popular vote. Each state carries a number of electoral votes, roughly in proportion to its population, and in almost every state the winner of the popular vote takes all of them. A candidate needs a majority of the 538 electoral votes, which is 270.

Counting in 2020 was unusually slow because the Covid-19 pandemic pushed record numbers of people to vote by post. Several battleground states, Pennsylvania among them, did not allow election officials to start processing postal ballots until polling day. Trump led in early in-person counts in those states, and his margin shrank as postal ballots, which leaned heavily towards Biden, were added. Networks waited until the morning of 7 November, four days after polling day, to call the race.

The final figures were decisive. Biden won 306 electoral votes to Trump's 232, and about 81.3 million votes nationally (51.3%) against Trump's 74.2 million (46.8%). Turnout reached 66.6% of eligible voters, the highest share since 1900. Biden, then 77, also became the oldest person ever elected to the office.

Kamala Harris and the vice-presidency

Harris, a senator from California and former attorney general of the state, made history three times over: the first woman, the first Black American and the first person of South Asian descent to be elected vice-president. Only two women had appeared on a major party's presidential ticket before her, Geraldine Ferraro in 1984 and Sarah Palin in 2008, and neither won.

The vice-president's formal powers are limited. She presides over the Senate and casts tie-breaking votes there, which mattered a great deal in an evenly split Senate. Her most important constitutional role is to be ready: if a president dies, resigns or is removed, the vice-president takes over for the rest of the term.

Why Trump refused to concede

On election night and in the days after, Trump declared that he had won and that the counting of legally cast postal ballots amounted to fraud. When the networks called the race he said the election was "far from over". No evidence of systematic fraud was ever produced, and senior figures in his own party began to distance themselves from the claims within days.

Karl Rove, the strategist behind George W. Bush's campaigns and a supporter of Trump, wrote in a Wall Street Journal column that week that some irregularities happen in every election, but that overturning the result would require theft on a scale he compared to a spy thriller:

"Stealing hundreds of thousands of votes would require a conspiracy on the scale of a James Bond movie. That isn't going to happen."

Adam Kinzinger, then a Republican congressman from Illinois, put it more bluntly on Twitter on 6 November, asking the president to bring evidence to court and stop repeating claims that had already been debunked:

We want every vote counted, yes every legal vote (of course). But, if you have legit concerns about fraud present EVIDENCE and take it to court. STOP Spreading debunked misinformation... This is getting insane.

— Adam Kinzinger (@RepKinzinger) November 6, 2020

The legal challenges and why they failed

The Trump campaign and its allies went on to file 63 lawsuits challenging the result in states such as Pennsylvania, Michigan, Georgia, Arizona, Wisconsin and Nevada. None succeeded in changing a single state's outcome. Judges appointed by both parties, including several Trump appointees, dismissed the cases for lack of evidence, lack of standing or because they asked courts to throw out lawful votes.

Other checks came from inside government. Georgia recounted its ballots and confirmed Biden's narrow win there. Recounts in two Wisconsin counties, paid for by the Trump campaign, increased Biden's lead slightly. Chris Krebs, the head of the federal Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, described 2020 as "the most secure in American history" and was fired by Trump days later. On 1 December, Attorney General William Barr said federal prosecutors and the FBI had found no fraud on a scale that could have changed the result. On 11 December the Supreme Court declined to hear Texas v. Pennsylvania, the case Trump's team had pinned its hopes on.

From projection to inauguration: the timeline

A network projection is not the legal result, and it helps to separate the steps:

• 3 November 2020: polling day.
• 7 November: major news organisations project Biden as the winner.
• Late November to early December: states certify their results.
• 14 December: the electors meet in each state and cast their votes, 306 for Biden and 232 for Trump.
• 6 to 7 January 2021: Congress counts the electoral votes. A pro-Trump mob broke into the Capitol on 6 January and forced lawmakers to flee. When they returned, both chambers rejected objections to Arizona's and Pennsylvania's results, and certification was completed in the early hours of 7 January.
• 20 January 2021: Biden and Harris are sworn in.

Trump did not attend the inauguration, and he never formally conceded.

What happened next

The fight over 2020 did not end with the inauguration. In August 2023 Trump was indicted by a federal grand jury in Washington on charges related to efforts to overturn the result, and separately in Fulton County, Georgia, alongside 18 co-defendants. The federal case was dropped after he won the 2024 presidential election, in line with the Justice Department's policy against prosecuting a sitting president. Several defendants in the Georgia case pleaded guilty.

Biden served one term. He withdrew from the 2024 race in July of that year, and Harris became the Democratic nominee. She lost to Trump, who returned to the White House in January 2025.

Common myths about the 2020 result

• "Votes counted after election night are suspicious." They are not. Many states count postal and provisional ballots for days, and the order in which ballot types are counted explains the late shift towards Biden.
• "The courts never looked at the evidence." Many cases were heard, and judges repeatedly said no evidence of widespread fraud had been presented.
• "The vice-president could have rejected the result." Mike Pence presided over the count but had no power to reject state electoral votes, a point he stated himself on 6 January.

If you want to read more around this election, our related piece on Trump's legal challenges as Biden's victory became clear covers the first days of the court fight.

Sources: Wikipedia: 2020 United States presidential election; Wikipedia: Attempts to overturn the 2020 United States presidential election; Al Jazeera, 7 January 2021: US Congress certifies Joe Biden as next president; Adam Kinzinger on Twitter, 6 November 2020. Karl Rove quote from his Wall Street Journal column, November 2020.