The 2020 presidential election

Editor’s note, January 6, 8:40 pm ET: This situation continues to evolve quickly after pro-Trump insurrectionists stormed the Capitol. Sens. Steve Daines (R-MT), Kelly Loeffler (R-GA), and James Lankford (R-OK) have indicated that they will no longer object to the vote certification. Additionally, Sen. Rand Paul (R-KY) has indicated that there should be no more objections, but not all 11 remaining planned objectors have confirmed that. This story will be updated with more information as it becomes available. For all of Vox’s latest coverage of the situation at the Capitol, follow our storystream.

On January 6, Congress is scheduled to certify the Electoral College vote.

President Donald Trump on Wednesday proclaimed on Twitter that the federal government “will be INTERVENING” in a long-shot Texas lawsuit challenging the results of the presidential election he lost to Joe Biden, adding that the case — which comes as Trump and his allies are on a historic streak of losing legal challenges — is “the big one.”

“Our Country needs a victory!” Trump wrote.

President Donald Trump’s ongoing effort to overturn the election results is almost certain to fail, because Joe Biden clearly and decisively won the election. But the president has self-interested reasons for dragging out the fight as long as he can.

The nearly 500 emails blasted out by the Trump campaign in November raised at least $170 million after Election Day, as Will Steakin and Soo Rin Kim reported for ABC on Tuesday. (For context, the Trump campaign account’s best monthly fundraising haul before the election came in September, when they raised a mere $81 million.) They’ve done so with highly misleading insinuations that the money is funding Trump’s farcical legal challenges of the election results, when a careful reading of the emails’ fine print shows the money is largely being raised for things like paying down campaign debt and funding Trump’s post-presidency operation.

President Donald Trump still has not conceded his defeat to President-elect Joe Biden, but his bid to overturn the election results has sputtered out over the past week.

The lawsuits of the Trump campaign and its allies have flopped. The key swing states Biden won have certified their results on schedule. And GOP state legislative leaders don’t appear to be seriously trying to interfere with the appointment of electors.

Republican officials in Wayne County, Michigan, made a stunning move to block the certification of their presidential election results Tuesday — but backed down a few hours later amid intense criticism.

Wayne County is the largest county in the state, it includes the city of Detroit (where the vast majority of the population is Black), and it votes heavily for Democrats. As with all Michigan counties, its election results go to a bipartisan board of canvassers for certification that has two Democrats and two Republicans.

President Donald Trump fired Chris Krebs, who led the Homeland Security Department’s Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA), on Tuesday evening — days after the agency, which is in charge of protecting elections, called the 2020 presidential election “the most secure in American history.”

Trump did so because the agency’s — and Krebs’s personal — defense of the integrity of the elections punctures Trump’s baseless claim that the election was stolen from him.

Joe Biden has been elected president, but Donald Trump still holds the office for the next two months. And in that time, for better or worse, he still can get a lot done.

There are no formal limitations on what a president can and can’t do between losing an election and the next president’s inauguration. For a historical indication of the most egregious stuff former presidents have done in that time, take a look at this piece by Slate.

Vice President-elect Kamala Harris began her acceptance speech with a strong statement: a white suit.

It was a striking message, sent before she said a word — the color was the one worn by suffragists as they fought for the right to vote.

Philadelphia — and I say this with great affection for a city I adore, where I have many friends and where I have had many amazing visits — is the city God coughed up.

Again, I mean that as a sort of compliment.

This conversation was first published on November 2, before any election results had come in. On November 6, 2020, Joe Biden became the first Democratic presidential candidate to win the state since 1992. As of January 6, 2021, it has two Democratic senators, thanks in part to the get-out-the-vote efforts of Abrams and others. Read the original conversation with Abrams below.

We’re one day away from the election, though who-knows-how-many days from finding out who won it. But there’s more at stake than whether Donald Trump or Joe Biden will be our next president. Democracy itself is on the ballot.

President-elect Joe Biden won this year’s election against President Donald Trump while campaigning on taking swift, decisive action against Covid-19.

The question now, as election results trickle in, is how much Biden will be able to do on his own — potentially without Congress.

As soon as President-elect Joe Biden won the 2020 election, congratulations poured in from several European politicians and officials desperate to work with him on climate change — likely in an effort to jump-start collaboration with the US on the Paris climate agreement.

Messages came in from two members of the European Parliament from Germany’s Green party. “Congrats Mr. President,” tweeted Rasmus Andersen while Jutta Paulus referred to Biden as “Mr. President-elect” and referenced the state of Pennsylvania, which Biden had just won, clinching the race.

Georgia is too close to call — and will probably be that way for the next several weeks.

On Friday, Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger announced that the state would likely be holding a recount. The margin between President-elect Joe Biden and President Donald Trump stands at just 1,585 votes as of 12:53 ET Friday (Biden currently leads 2,450,186 votes to 2,448,629).

Joe Biden is president-elect, and Wall Street mostly feels fine about it.

Investors learned to ignore Donald Trump’s erratic tweets over the last four years and focus on deregulation and tax cuts. And now that his presidency is coming to an end, Wall Street appears to be putting on blinders yet again and brushing off the president’s flailing attempts to cast doubt on the election outcome and stay in power.

Joe Biden took the lead over Donald Trump by a little more than 1,000 votes in Georgia early Friday morning, with many votes still to count. It won’t be decisive, with Pennsylvania’s 20 Electoral College votes winning Biden the presidency, but if the lead holds, flipping Georgia will still be extremely satisfying for Democrats after several anxious days of waiting for the results.

The margin would be as narrow as it could be. There are lots of factors in what made Georgia so competitive this year — including a fired-up Black voter base, college-educated suburbs leaning away from Republicans, and the legacy of the late John Lewis hanging over the election after his death this year.

Police in Philadelphia are probing an alleged plot to attack the Pennsylvania Convention Center on Thursday night after receiving a tip that a group traveling north from Virginia in a Hummer planned to storm the location of vote-counting efforts.

No one was harmed; the police arrested two men in connection with the alleged plot, and no attack or other violence was carried out.

Joe Biden has proposed a health care plan that could cover 25 million uninsured Americans. The question now that he’s won the White House is whether he can pass it.

The Democratic president-elect has put forward a plan that would build on the Affordable Care Act (ACA). That means much of the existing US health care system would remain in place: Most working people would continue to get their health insurance through their employer, Medicare and Medicaid would be preserved, and the ACA would be expanded.

As polling almost unanimously (over)predicted, Joe Biden has amassed the electoral votes necessary to become the 46th president of the United States. The outlook for global warming has consequently been upgraded from hopeless to merely very desperate.

Without the Senate, which will likely remain in Republican hands (though control could come down to two runoffs in Georgia), Biden’s power to effect the kind of radical change called for by the Green New Deal will be substantially curtailed. But he will not be powerless — there are expansive parts of his climate agenda that he can drive through executive power alone.

This morning I woke up feeling like I ran a marathon, when in reality I spent most of yesterday evening slowly finishing an entire grandma pizza and a bottle of wine. It’s not the carbs or the alcohol making me feel gross today, though (or at least not entirely). It was the fact that last night was absolutely exhausting.

The best way to describe the particular feeling of election night was whiplash: Thanks to obsessive polling, constant cable news commentary, and the horrible return of “the needle,” every few minutes it felt like the entire mood of the race was shifting, despite the fact we’ve been told for weeks that this year’s count would likely take longer than usual. Liberals would rejoice on Twitter one moment and despair the next, and vice versa. It was — and remains! — terrible, no matter who you’re rooting for. As Vulture succinctly noted, “Watching CNN on Election Night Felt Like Being Dipped in Boiling Oil.”

For third-party candidates running in this year’s presidential election, 2020 is decidedly nothing like 2016. Rather, it’s more like 2004, or 2012.

Technically, there are 11 people running for president this year, four of whom could, by appearing on enough state ballots, hypothetically receive the 270 votes required to win the Electoral College and thus the White House: Republican incumbent Donald Trump, Democratic nominee Joe Biden, Libertarian Party nominee Jo Jorgensen, and Green Party nominee Howie Hawkins.

President Donald Trump is closing his 2020 presidential campaign by arguing that his only mistake in dealing with the Covid-19 pandemic was mishandling “public relations.”

“We got hit with the ‘China virus,’” Trump said on Tuesday during a stop at his campaign headquarters in Arlington, Virginia. “We’ve done an incredible job with respect to that — other than public relations.”

For four years Tim Fitzgerald, a PR coordinator, has locked away a pair of Saint-Laurent sneakers — silver, with red stars and a blue heel tab — in the deepest, darkest part of his closet. He was an intern and working at YSL in 2016 and decided to don the pair on Election Day. Fitzgerald wore them all day, including to vote for Hillary Clinton for president.

“We all thought it was cute. I voted that night and then it all happened,” Fitzgerald told me. The “it all” Fitzgerald is referring to is Clinton’s Electoral College collapse and loss to Donald Trump.

It is quite possible, even probable, that the American people are staring down at least three more months without any further stimulus or economic support from the federal government, even as the Covid-19 pandemic rages on and life is nowhere near back to normal. To put it plainly, help is not on the way.

If Joe Biden wins the election, it’s difficult to see a lot of energy from a lame-duck president and Republican Senate to push new stimulus legislation through. And if Donald Trump wins, well, he’s been president this whole time, and beyond an errant tweet here and there, he seems to have shrugged off further stimulus talks lately. The same goes for many Republicans in Congress.

President Trump has repeatedly refused to say whether he’ll accept the results of the 2020 election. During one debate, he told a far-right street-fighting group to “stand back and stand by,” raising concerns about violence on November 3 and beyond. He’s also made false claims that the winner must be decided on election night, before many votes will be counted, and said he expects the winner to be decided by the Supreme Court.

All this has many people concerned that even if Democratic nominee Joe Biden wins the election, Trump will refuse to concede — or that the president will seek to block enough votes through court challenges that he will be declared the winner.

There’s just no sugarcoating it: The risk of violence in America on or after Election Day is the highest it’s been in recent memory.

The nation is extremely polarized, with both sides viewing the other as a threat to the country. Concerns over the legitimacy of the election persist, exacerbated by the president, who has called on supporters to join his “army” of poll watchers. Activists on the left and armed militias on the right are preparing to take to the streets if the election is contested.