Ten facts about the 2020 election
In total, 158,395,371 people voted this election cycle, according to the Cook Political Report’s National Popular Vote Tracker. The U.S. Elections Project estimates that the total voting-eligible population (VEP) in 2020 — the voting-age population (VAP), minus disenfranchised felons and non-citizens — was 239,247,182. The turnout rate, then (voters divided by VEP), was 66.2%. (The Elections Project, whose ballot estimates are slightly higher than the Cook Report’s, puts the rate at 66.7%, but the difference is negligible.) Sixty-six percent is an unusually strong turnout for an American election — the strongest, in fact, since 1900 — but fairly weak compared to other developed countries. Joe Biden received (again using the Cook Report’s numbers) 81,282,376 votes, while Donald Trump received 74,222,576; in other words, Biden won 51.3% of the vote against Trump’s 46.9%. Biden’s edge in the popular vote (4.4%) was about twice Hillary Clinton’s in 2016 (2.1%), and higher than Barack Obama’s in 2012 (3.9%), but about half Obama’s in 2008 (7.3%) and Bill Clinton’s in 1996 (8.5%), and nowhere near the Republican landslides of the 80s. In terms of the VEP — the pool of people eligible to vote — Biden won 34.0% of the potential electorate against Trump’s 31.0%. According to an exit poll by Morning Consult, which used data from more than 20,000 respondents, 22% of Trump voters (16.3 million people) said they were voting against Biden rather than for Trump. According to the same poll, twice as many Biden voters — 44%, or 35.7 million people — said they were voting against Trump rather than for Biden. On 20 January 2021, the United States will inaugurate a president whom only 19% of the population wanted to vote for as president.

(A bonus: The number of nonvoters plus the number of strategic voters — those who voted against a candidate rather than for one — equals 132,958,760 people: 55.6% of the voting-eligible population. That is a majority of the country — you could even call it a silent majority.)
['Desmond O Halloran']
['2020', 'Elections', '2020 Presidential Race', 'Election 2020', 'Voting']