Electoral history of Joe Biden

This is the electoral history of Joe Biden, the 46th and current president of the United States.[1] Biden served as the 47th vice president (2009–2017), and as a United States senator from Delaware (1973–2009). Biden is the oldest elected and serving president, the second Catholic president, after John F. Kennedy, and the first president from Delaware.

Biden at his presidential kick-off rally in Philadelphia, May 2019

This article is part of a series about Joe Biden
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A member of the Democratic Party, Biden was elected to the New Castle County Council in 1970, and became the sixth-youngest senator in American history when he was elected to the U.S. Senate from Delaware in 1972, at the age of 29. He was re-elected to the Senate six times, and was the fourth-most senior senator. He ran unsuccessfully for the Democratic presidential nomination in both 1988 and 2008.

In January 2009, Biden resigned from the Senate, to serve as Barack Obama's vice president, after they won the 2008 presidential election. They were re-elected to a second term in 2012. As vice president, Biden oversaw infrastructure spending in 2009, to counteract the Great Recession.[2] His negotiations with congressional Republicans helped pass legislation including the 2010 Tax Relief Act, which resolved a taxation deadlock;[3] the Budget Control Act of 2011, which resolved a debt ceiling crisis;[4] and the American Taxpayer Relief Act of 2012, which addressed the impending "fiscal cliff".[5]

Biden announced his candidacy in the 2020 presidential election on April 25, 2019.[6] A total of 29 major candidates declared their candidacies for the primaries, the largest field of presidential candidates for any American political party since 1972;[7] but over time, the field narrowed down to Biden and Senator Bernie Sanders from Vermont.[8] Eventually, Sanders withdrew from the race, and Biden became the presumptive Democratic nominee in April 2020. [9] Biden reached the delegate threshold needed to secure the nomination in June 2020.[10] He defeated incumbent president Donald Trump in the general election, with 306 electoral votes to Trump's 232. Biden received more than 81 million votes, the most votes ever cast for a candidate in a U.S. presidential election.[11]