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2020 United States presidential election facts for kids

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2020 United States presidential election

← 2016 November 3, 2020 2024 →

538 members of the Electoral College
270 electoral votes needed to win
Turnout TBA
Votes counted
93%
as of Nov. 8, 2020, 6:57 a.m. EST
  Joe Biden 2013.jpg Donald Trump official portrait (cropped).jpg
Nominee Joe Biden Donald Trump
Party Democrat Republican
Home state Delaware Florida
Running mate Kamala Harris Mike Pence
Projected electoral vote 279 214
States carried 23 + DC + NE-02 23 + ME-02
Popular vote 75,196,516 70,803,881
Percentage 50.6% 47.7%

ElectoralCollege2020 with results.png
The 2020 electoral map results Blue shows states won by Biden/Harris. Red shows states won by Trump/Pence.

President before election

Donald Trump
Republican

President-elect

Joe Biden
Democrat

The 2020 United States presidential election happened on November 3, 2020. Voters selected presidential electors who will then vote on December 14, 2020 to either elect a new President and Vice President or re-elect the incumbents. On November 7, most news agencies said that Joe Biden won the election and became the president-elect of the United States. He will be inaugurated on January 20, 2021.

Donald Trump, the 45th President, started a campaign to be President again in the Republican primaries. Several state Republican Party organizations have 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 the 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.

Main issues of the election included the impact of the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic, which killed over 220,000 Americans; protests in reaction to the Killing 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.

Background

The 2020 U.S. presidential election was the first time all members of the millennial generation will be able to vote. The age group of persons in the 18 to 45-year-old area are 40 percent of those able to vote in 2020. It has also been estimated that 0.2 percent of eligible voters in the 2020 U.S. presidential election were Hispanic.

The United States House of Representatives voted to impeach President Donald Trump on December 18, 2019, making him the third president in American history to be impeached. He was acquitted by the United States Senate on February 5, 2020.

Mail voting

More people voted by mail in the United States, with 25% of voters nationwide mailing their ballots in 2016 and 2018. The COVID-19 pandemic in 2020 means there has been an increase in mail voting because of the possible danger of large groups at polling places. For the 2020 election, a state-by-state analysis found that 76% of Americans are eligible to vote by mail in 2020, a record number. The analysis predicted that 80 million ballots could be cast by mail in 2020—more than double the number in 2016. The Postal Service sent a letter to multiple states in July 2020, warning that the service would not be able to meet the state's deadlines for requesting and casting last-minute absentee ballots.

President Trump has been critical of voting by mail saying that it would make it easier for voter fraud to happen. Many people are dropping their votes in voting boxes in their voting places instead of going to the polls.

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See also

Kids robot.svg In Spanish: Elecciones presidenciales de Estados Unidos de 2020 para niños

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