2020 United States presidential election

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The 2020 United States presidential election was the 59th quadrennial presidential election, held on Tuesday, November 3, 2020. The Democratic ticket of former vice president Joe Biden and incumbent U.S. senator from California Kamala Harris defeated the Republican ticket of incumbent president Donald Trump and vice president Mike Pence. Biden won the election and was inaugurated January 20, 2021. The election was known for taking place during the COVID-19 pandemic and racial unrest following the killing of George Floyd. Afterwards Trump refused to concede defeat and alleged electoral fraud, carrying out a series of unsuccessful lawsuits to overturn the election. This culminated with the 2021 storming of the United States Capitol.

Quotes[edit]

  • You know, one of the things that continues to bother us in the way in which the moderators don’t even bring up an issue that, before COVID-19, was impacting 43% of this nation. A hundred forty million people, before COVID, were poor and low-wealth, and 62 million people working for less than a living wage. And since COVID, we know that millions have been added to the poverty and low-wealth numbers. We’re well over 50% because of the new poor. We know we had 87 million people before COVID that were either uninsured or underinsured, and now some 20 million people have been added because of people who have lost their insurance because they’ve lost their jobs. Forty percent of the jobs that make $40,000 a year have been lost.
  • North Carolina was the scene of the crime of the worst voter suppression, after the case out of Alabama and when the Supreme Court gutted Section 5. And Ruth Bader Ginsburg said that it’s like putting away your umbrella — the Shelby case, it was — putting away your umbrella in a rainstorm. And in North Carolina, Amy, when it was done, the Republicans there said, "Now that the problem has — the headache has been removed, we can do what we want to." And guess what. Everything Pence just said, we heard in 2013. And they tried to roll back every progressive way of voting. And they actually went to the books and looked at how did it benefit Black and Brown people and young people, and those were the rules they tried to roll back. And the court said it was surgical — surgical racism. And what I saw in North Carolina, what we defeated in North Carolina, what we filed suit against in North Carolina, is now what Trump and Pence are talking about doing on the national level: surgical racism with surgical precision.
  • The 2020 US presidential election was rigged even worse than the 2000 and 1960 elections. For example, there is literally ZERO chance that Joe Biden got more votes in Minnesota than Obama in 2008, Obama in 2012, and Hilary Clinton in 2016. Zero. You’d have to be entirely ignorant of statistics and statistical reality to even pretend that there were no shenanigans.
  • While we can't guarantee that candidates will stick to their campaign promises, we still must ask this vital question: What prospects for peace might each of them bring to the White House? In 1989, at the end of the Cold War, former Pentagon officials Robert McNamara and Larry Korb told the Senate Budget Committee that the U.S. military budget could safely be cut by 50% over the next 10 years...
    Presidential campaigns are key moments for raising these issues. We are greatly encouraged by Tulsi Gabbard's courageous decision to place solving the crisis of war and militarism at the heart of her presidential campaign. We thank Bernie Sanders for voting against the obscenely bloated military budget year after year, and for identifying the military-industrial complex as one of the most powerful interest groups that his political revolution must confront. We applaud Elizabeth Warren for condemning "the stranglehold of defense contractors on our military policy." And we welcome Marianne Williamson, Andrew Yang and other original voices to this debate.
  • We need to hear a much more vigorous debate about war and peace in this campaign, with more specific plans from all the candidates. This vicious cycle of U.S. wars, militarism and runaway military spending drains our resources, corrupts our national priorities and undermines international cooperation, including on the existential dangers of climate change and nuclear weapons proliferation, which no country can solve on its own... We are calling for this debate most of all because we mourn the millions of people being killed by our country's wars and we want the killing to stop. If you have other priorities, we understand and respect that. But unless and until we address militarism and all the money it sucks out of our national coffers, it may well prove impossible to solve the other very serious problems facing the United States and the world in the 21st century.
  • Trump spoke with Xi Jinping by phone on June 18, ahead of 2019's Osaka G20 summit, when they would next meet. Trump began by telling Xi he missed him and then said that the most popular thing he had ever been involved with was making a trade deal with China, which would be a big plus politically. They agreed their economic teams could continue meeting. The G20 bilateral arrived, and during the usual media mayhem at the start, Trump said, "we've become friends. My trip to Beijing with my family was one of the most incredible of my life." With the press gone, Xi said this is the most important bilateral relationship in the world. He said that some (unnamed) political figures in the United States were making erroneous judgments by calling for a new cold war, this time between China and the United States. Whether Xi meant to finger the Democrats, or some of us sitting on the US side of the table, I don't know, but Trump immediately assumed Xi meant the Democrats. Trump said approvingly that there was great hostility among the Democrats. He then, stunningly, turned the conversation to the coming US presidential election, alluding to China's economic capability to affect the ongoing campaigns, pleading with Xi to ensure he'd win. He stressed the importance of farmers, and increased Chinese purchases of soybeans and wheat in the electoral outcome. I would print Trump's exact words, but the government's prepublication review process has decided otherwise.
  • ...We live in a society where some people have a great deal of power, and most people have very little. And that this works out well for the few and not so well for the many. This plays out in the political realm with the few using their power to support candidates who would maintain that power. In the past..[news] outlets told us very little about which candidates were beholden to whose interests... ensuring that few people outside the donor class were aware of who was doing the donating.
    A funny thing happened in the 21st century: The development of digital technologies made it much cheaper to create and distribute information... this ability allows us to have conversations about politics that we’ve always needed and never have had until now... These discussions of candidates’ financial and policy histories can look like negativity—because it’s seldom good news when a line can be drawn between where politicians gets their resources and how they do their jobs. But the possibility of picking nominees based on who can best serve the interests of voters rather than donors is really one of the most positive developments in modern politics.
  • Make America Rake Again, Lawn And Order!
  • Elections that have been held with mail have found substantial fraud and coercion... For example, we indicted someone in Texas, 1,700 ballots collected, he — from people who could vote, he made them out and voted for the person he wanted to. OK?
  • Probably the most depressing thought is that Democrats are going to learn all the wrong lessons from this election, because the polls really do show Biden is up in a crushing way now. The reason for that is, very simply, Trump failed miserably on Covid-19, 209,000 Americans are dead as of the recording of this video, and the economy is a mess!
    So you have a terrible economy and you have over 200,000 deaths from a pandemic, and you have general chaos. So, the election is a referendum on Trump and on those things, and a ham sandwich could beat Trump, but the lesson that the Democrats are going to take away is, 'Oh, Joe Biden is awesome, which means the establishment is awesome, which means the status quo is awesome, which means neoliberal corporatism is awesome, which means business as usual is awesome, which means let's continue with this formula for decades.'
  • Six weeks ago, Americans voted in this year’s general election. The legal and constitutional processes have continued to play out. Yesterday, electors met in all 50 states. So, as of this morning, our country officially has a President-elect and a Vice President-elect. Many millions of us had hoped the presidential election would yield a different result. But our system of government has processes to determine who will be sworn in on January the 20th. The Electoral College has spoken. So today, I want to congratulate President-elect Joe Biden. The President-elect is no stranger to the Senate. He has devoted himself to public service for many years. I also congratulate the Vice President-elect, our colleague from California, Senator Harris. Beyond our differences, all Americans can take pride that our nation has a female Vice President-elect for the first time. I look forward to finishing out the next 36 days strong with President Trump. Our nation needs us to add another bipartisan chapter to this record of achievement.
    • Mitch McConnell, "The Electoral College has Spoken," (15 December 2020), as quoted in Vital Speeches of the Day, 87(2), pp. 28–29.
  • There is no loss from him [Biden] getting the briefings and to be able to do that and if that's not occuring by Friday I will step in as well, and to be able to push and to say this needs to occur so that regardless of the outcome of the election ... people can be ready for that actual task
  • Well, certainly, here in Georgia, we have upwards of 200 open investigations. We're in the courts right now. We have heard and seen too much. We need to get to the bottom of it.
  • Well, these cases haven't been heard. They deserve to be heard. We need to make sure that we get to the bottom of this because the integrity of voting is at the core of our democracy. We have to protect that. We have to have people who are willing to fight for it and defend it, and that's what I'm looking at right now.
  • Having failed to make even a plausible case of widespread fraud or conspiracy before any court of law, the President has now resorted to overt pressure on state and local officials to subvert the will of the people and overturn the election. It is difficult to imagine a worse, more undemocratic action by a sitting American President.
  • The number of ballots that our Campaign is challenging in the Pennsylvania case is FAR LARGER than the 81,000 vote margin. It’s not even close. Fraud and illegality ARE a big part of the case. Documents being completed. We will appeal!

See also[edit]

External links[edit]

Encyclopedic article on 2020 United States presidential election on Wikipedia

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