United States presidential election of 2020, U.S. presidential election held on Nov. 3, 2020, in the midst of the global coronavirus (SARS-CoV-2) pandemic, in which Democrat Joe Biden defeated Republican Donald Trump, the incumbent, to become the 46th president of the United States. Biden garnered more than 81 million votes to win the popular vote by more than seven million ballots and to triumph in the Electoral College by a count of 306 to 232. Refusing to acknowledge Biden’s victory, Trump—whose controversial presidency had exacerbated the country’s already hyper-partisan political divide—claimed without evidence that the election had been stolen from him through fraud and mounted unsuccessful legal challenges in several states that he had lost. Widespread acceptance of Trump’s baseless insistence that the election had been stolen ultimately led to the storming of the U.S. Capitol by Trump supporters on Jan. 6, 2021, the day that the Electoral College results were to be ceremoniously reported to a joint session of Congress. Identifying the provocative speech that Trump delivered to supporters before the insurrectionist mob invaded the Capitol as “inciting violence against the government of the United States,” the House of Representatives subsequently impeached the lame duck president. On Feb. 13 seven Republican senators joined all the Senate Democrats in voting 57–43 to convict Trump; however, that tally was short of the two-thirds majority necessary for conviction.
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