How many votes did Joe Biden receive in the 2020 presidential election?
1. The raw count: how many votes did Biden get?
Contemporary tallies and post-election analyses report that Joe Biden garnered approximately 81.3 million votes in November 2020, surpassing previous records for total ballots cast for a presidential candidate [1]; several encyclopedic and media summaries likewise characterize his total as “more than 81 million” [4].
2. What that number means in percentage and context
Biden’s raw total amounted to roughly 51.3% of the national popular vote, a four-point margin over Donald Trump and the highest share for a challenger to an incumbent since 1932, reflecting unusually high turnout during a pandemic year [2] [5].
3. Electoral College vs. popular vote: how the totals translated to victory
While the popular vote provides the raw tally, the decisive mechanism was the Electoral College: Biden secured 306 electoral votes to Trump’s 232, clinching the presidency once states certified and electors cast ballots in December and Congress counted them in January [3] [6] [7].
4. Record turnout and the scale of the margin
The 2020 election set turnout records, producing both Biden’s record raw total and a historic raw total for Trump (about 74.2 million), leaving Biden with a popular-vote edge of roughly seven million ballots—the widest raw-margin between the two major-party candidates in modern history [1] [4].
5. Contested claims and official rulings about the count
Despite persistent and high-profile allegations of widespread fraud and efforts to overturn results, federal and state officials, including the Justice Department under Attorney General William Barr and election-security agencies, found no evidence of fraud on the scale that would change the outcome; major news outlets and state certifications finalized Biden’s win before the Electoral College vote [3] [7].
6. Source limits and how numbers are reported
Primary official compilations (state certifications and the FEC’s 2020 presidential results document) provide definitive vote totals; publicly available summaries in outlets like Statista and encyclopedias (Britannica, Wikipedia) converge on the ~81.3 million figure and 51.3% share, though phrasing varies between “about 81.3 million” and “more than 81 million” in the sources consulted [1] [4] [2]. The FEC’s official PDF is listed among the authoritative records [8], but the accessible snippets in this reporting set do not reproduce the exact digit-by-digit transcript; therefore reporting relies on widely cited post-certification aggregates [1] [4].
7. Conclusion: concise, documented answer
The best-supported, widely cited figure is that Joe Biden received about 81.3 million votes in the 2020 presidential election, equal to roughly 51.3% of the popular vote, and that he won the Electoral College 306 to 232 after state certifications and the formal counting by Congress [1] [2] [6].