Trump or Biden? With historical participation and polarized electorate, the US goes to the polls to define who will be president as of 2021 | 2020 U.S. elections

The number becomes even more impressive when it is remembered that voting is not mandatory in the United States. In 2016, about 60% of the 240 million eligible citizens voted, but this year the percentage is expected to exceed 65%, according to projections.

However, it is not yet known when the winner will be announced.. Unlike in 2016, when Trump’s victory was confirmed the morning after voting day, this year’s vote count is expected to take longer.

This is because some states only begin counting votes that arrive in the mail after the polls close. As it is necessary to validate the authenticity of the ballot and, in 2020, there was an increase in this type of voting, the delay is predicted by the majority of US electoral analysts.

To win the elections and become president, it is not enough to obtain the highest number of popular votes. The United States adopts the Electoral College system, which has 538 members. A presidential candidate needs to secure 270 of them to get to office.

• Understand the voting system in the United States

When American voters vote, they are actually deciding who to deliver their state delegates to. And the states with more inhabitants have more delegates in the Electoral College. The Electoral College system exists precisely so that the most populated states have greater weight in the decision.

To help, almost all states, with the exception of Maine and Nebraska only, adopt a system called “winner takes all,” in which the candidate with the most delegates gets all.

In addition to the president, Americans also vote in this election for deputies and senators who will compose a new Congress starting in January 2021. All 435 seats in the House and 35 of the 100 seats in the Senate are up for grabs.

The result can change the majorities in both houses and directly influence support for the president-elect, whoever he is.

Currently, Democrats have a majority in the House, with 232 deputies, against 197 Republicans. There is also a Libertarian MP and five vacant seats, four due to resignations and one after the death of Congressman John Lewis in July this year.

In the Senate, the majority is Republican. Of the 100 seats, they have 53, while the Democrats have 45. There are still two independent senators.

Presidential candidates

Regardless of whether Republican Trump, 74, is re-elected for a second term, or if Democrat Biden, 77, becomes the 46th president, one thing is for sure: The United States will have its oldest president in the United States. history as of January 20, 2021.

Biden, vice president during the administration of Barack Obama, appears with the advantage in practically all the polls, even in some states that are traditionally Republican strongholds, but there is no guarantee that he will win the 270 necessary votes in the Electoral College: in 2016, for example Hillary Clinton had more popular votes, but was not elected.

One of the most traditional politicians in the United States, he was only 29 years old when he was elected senator from the state of Delaware in 1972. Shortly after, he lost his first wife and an 18-month-old daughter in a car accident, and was sworn in. in the hospital room where one of her sons was hospitalized.

Biden was a senator until 2017, including during his time as vice president in the US, the vice president is also the president of the Senate.

Born in 1942 in Pennsylvania, into a Catholic family (the United States is predominantly Protestant), he remarried in 1977 to Jill Tracy Jacobs and had other children. Biden had to face a second personal tragedy. Beau Biden, her oldest son, was diagnosed with a brain tumor in 2013 and died two years later.

Beau was a close friend of Sen. Kamala Harris, Joe Biden’s deputy candidate at the plate.

• See artists supporting Trump or Biden

Donald Trump ran as a presidential candidate in 2015 without any prior experience in political office. He was known as a mogul and television host at the time, and the ad came to be seen as an eccentricity of his, seeking to return to the spotlight after failing to host the reality show “The Apprentice.”

A member of the Republican Party in 1987, Trump began political life aligned with Presidents Ronald Reagan and George H. Bush. When Democrat Bill Clinton won in 1992, he remained in opposition. However, in 2001, Republican George W. Bush’s first year in the White House, he declared himself a Democrat. Finally, in 2009, the inaugural year of Barack Obama, Trump changed sides again.

Trump never hid that he would seek reelection in 2020. Even before taking office in January 2017, the Republican revealed to the newspaper “The Washington Post” that he already had a slogan ready for the new presidential race: “Keep America Great” – ” Keep America Great “.

In 2020, an unprecedented number of Americans decided to advance the vote, either in person or by mail. Due to the coronavirus pandemic, the remote voting system, which was previously only available to some states, has been adopted across the country. As of Monday, more than 95 million votes had been cast, more than 60.4 million by mail.

In Texas, for example, only the first votes cast through Friday (30) already exceeded all state votes in the 2016 election. The same is true in Hawaii. In Montana, the rate is 99.1% and in North Carolina, one of the states considered decisive, 95.4%.

Initially, there was an increase in Democratic votes across the country, in proportions that reached two to one in several states. However, closer to the date of the elections, the gap began to narrow. In the second, in the 19 states that record the affiliation to electoral parties, 45.4% were Democrats and 30% Republicans. On Tuesday (27), the Democrats were 49% and the Republicans, 28%.

In a country more polarized than ever, Republicans and Democrats ran a completely different election campaign this year, with much less rallies and public events, just two debates between presidential candidates and a dominant issue: a virus that infected more than 9 million citizens, killed more than 230,000 and left the American economy – Trump’s big bet in his campaign for re-election – in disorder.

If the fear of crowds was one of the factors that led many people to vote before this Tuesday, fear of disturbances made some prefer to stay home on Election Day.

A document released in early October by the US Department of Homeland Security points to risks related to the elections, according to the BBC.

Besides the threats foreign and digital crimes, the department says that “violent domestic extremists (EVEs) and other actors can target events related to the 2020 presidential campaigns, the elections themselves, the election results or the post-election period.”

“Some EVEs have increased their attention to electoral or campaign activities, public statements by candidates and political issues related to specific candidates,” the text says.

In October alone, two arrested men were charged with having plans to kill Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden, one in Maryland and the other in North Carolina. Additionally, earlier this month, the FBI announced the arrest of 13 people involved in armed militias that planned to kidnap Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer.

Also contributing to the tense atmosphere was the speech of President Donald Trump himself, who on several occasions stated, always without presenting any evidence, that there could be fraud in the postal voting system.

Mainly on his Twitter profile, he questioned the integrity of the electoral process, caused a stir by guiding his voters in North Carolina to vote twice, a crime, and went as far as claiming, even in September, that he believed in the winner’s decision. it could end up in the Supreme Court.

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