Joe Biden’s 2020 presidential campaign

President Donald Trump’s gains with Latino voters in Florida’s Miami-Dade County and Texas’s Rio Grande Valley have gotten a lot of attention. But in 2020, Latinos proved once again that their political leanings defy a concise definition: In battleground states like Arizona, Nevada, Pennsylvania, and Michigan, Latinos helped deliver victories that made Joe Biden’s ascent to the presidency possible.

It could be months before more robust data on the Latino electorate becomes available. The American Election Eve poll from Latino Decisions suggested that a large majority of Latino voters nationwide supported Biden, possibly higher than the about 66 percent of Latino voters Hillary Clinton won in 2016. But most polls underestimated Trump’s performance this cycle, so Biden’s actual margin among Latinos may be smaller than Clinton’s. Early exit poll data suggests that’s the case, though this kind of data is sometimes even less reliable.

It’s now President-elect Joe Biden’s job to help stitch back together the world President Trump helped tear apart.

Climate change has become more dire. The coronavirus has upended lives and economies. America’s allies trust it less. China has taken advantage of the chaos to gain power. Iran has moved closer to obtaining a nuclear weapon, while North Korea and Russia have strengthened their nuclear and missile arsenals. And the US remains at war.

Millennials and Gen Zers may be branded the “distractible” generations, but they did not lose focus this election. Young people across the country turned out at a higher rate than 2016, playing a key role in tight races.

A November 6 analysis from the Center for Information and Research on Civic Learning and Engagement (CIRCLE) at Tufts University shows that youth voter turnout (ages 18 to 29) surged by around 8 percent this year compared to 2016. Based on the conservative end of CIRCLE’s preliminary estimate, 53 percent of eligible youth voters cast votes in this election versus 45 percent in 2016.

President-elect Joe Biden stopped short of declaring victory on Friday night, instead seeking to unify a divided nation and urge patience with the democratic process as the vote count continues in key states.

“I know watching these vote tallies on TV move slowly upward can be numbing,” Biden acknowledged in his speech in Wilmington, Delaware.

Joe Biden has proposed a health care plan that could cover 25 million uninsured Americans. The question now that he’s won the White House is whether he can pass it.

The Democratic president-elect has put forward a plan that would build on the Affordable Care Act (ACA). That means much of the existing US health care system would remain in place: Most working people would continue to get their health insurance through their employer, Medicare and Medicaid would be preserved, and the ACA would be expanded.

As results from Election Day began to roll in, it was clear that former Vice President Joe Biden met a mixed reception from Hispanic voters in some key states where they make up a significant portion of the electorate — a result that has ignited a debate in the Democratic Party about what he could have done to better appeal to such voters, who are critical to the party’s coalition.

Hispanic voters in America — whose political leanings vary with gender, generation, country of origin, religion, and how long they have lived in the US — often defy simple explanations, and this year proved no exception.

Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden says he’s “on track” to win the 2020 election, even though neither he nor President Donald Trump has won the requisite 270 Electoral College votes needed to clinch the race.

In an address to supporters early Wednesday morning, Biden sounded confident about his chances. “We feel good about where we are,” the former vice president boomed in Wilmington, Delaware. “We believe we’re on track to win this election.”

Election Day is closing in, and former Vice President Joe Biden has made climate change one of his signature issues. His “clean energy revolution and environmental justice” plan would be the most ambitious and aggressive environmental agenda in US history if it were enacted.

Voters, especially young voters, also crave action on climate change. Polling shows that a majority of Americans of all ages want all levels of government to address global warming, but it’s one of the highest priorities for young Democrats.

If there’s one thing about President Donald Trump’s foreign policy Democrats agree on, it’s that his decimation of the State Department made America less safe. But ask party leaders how to rebuild the nation’s top diplomatic agency, and their answers differ wildly.

There’s no consensus on whether State should be equal to, or more powerful than, the Defense Department. There’s no agreement on how central diplomacy should be in US foreign policy instead of military prowess, economic engagement, or values promotion. And there’s no shared belief on what authorities State should wrest from competing government bodies, including the White House’s National Security Council.

New national polls, taken both before and after President Donald Trump began treatment for Covid-19 at Walter Reed National Military Medical Center, show Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden with a significant advantage over the president one month out from Election Day.

One of those polls, conducted by NBC News and the Wall Street Journal, found Biden to have the largest lead of the campaign thus far, leading his rival by 14 percentage points.

One of the most controversial criminal justice issues in the 2020 election may be a “tough on crime” law passed 26 years ago — and authored by Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden.

If you ask some criminal justice reform activists, the 1994 crime law passed by Congress and signed by President Bill Clinton, which was meant to reverse decades of rising crime, was one of the key contributors to mass incarceration in the 1990s. They say it led to more prison sentences, more prison cells, and more aggressive policing — especially hurting Black and brown Americans, who are disproportionately likely to be incarcerated.

Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden’s lead over President Donald Trump in national polling now stands at a 10 percentage point margin in new polling of registered voters conducted by the Washington Post and ABC News.

That lead was reflected in additional polls reported over the weekend — in an Emerson College/NewsNation poll of likely voters, Biden led Trump by 4 percentage points, a slight jump from an August Emerson poll that showed Trump behind by just 2 percentage points.

In 2016, when traditional American campaign activities like door-to-door canvassing and celebrity-studded get-out-the-vote concerts were centerpieces of presidential campaigns, a viral post of support from a social media star would have been a nice little bonus for candidates.

Four years later, amid an ongoing pandemic that’s made in-person campaigning a public health hazard, much of the electoral battleground has moved to the internet — and getting a boost from influencers on Instagram, TikTok, or YouTube is an increasingly important campaign tactic, particularly for Democrats.

The Biden team’s planning for a hypothetical administration is already well underway. And on questions of economic policy, the transition effort is already becoming a locus of a fight about what a Democratic White House should look like.

On one side stand progressives, urging the creation of something like an ideological social democratic party. They want to draw a firm line between Democrats and the business community — leaning sharply against selecting personnel who’ve spent the Trump years working in the private sector in favor of career public sector and public interest workers.

For the first time in years, the foreign policy fight in the 2020 US presidential election isn’t about which candidate would best win wars, but rather which would most quickly end them.

President Donald Trump and former Vice President Joe Biden are both trying to position themselves as the leader who will finally extricate America from its “forever wars” and focus more on domestic issues. In essence, in what has turned into a “peace election,” they’re both pushing to be the “peace candidate” despite having track records that make it hard to claim such a title.

When Democrat Beto O’Rourke lost a Senate race to incumbent Republican Ted Cruz in 2018, it was a blow not just to his political prospects but to the long-held Democratic dream of turning Texas blue.

O’Rourke, fueled by a record-breaking $80 million in individual donations, lost to Cruz by less than 3 points. Now he’s arguing that in 2020, presidential nominee Joe Biden could achieve what he failed to do — but only if Democrats are willing to pour resources into the state.

In recent months, one consistent weak spot in former Vice President Joe Biden’s presidential polls has been with Latino voters.

Hillary Clinton won an estimated 66 percent of those voters in 2016. Biden appears to be earning between 45 percent and 64 percent of Latino support nationally. In Florida, Biden’s lead among Latinos is substantially slimmer than Clinton’s results in 2016 exit polls (11 percentage points off Clinton in a recent poll), which could become the difference between winning or losing a swing state that backed Trump in the last election.

June 2, 2020, was Joe Biden’s moment to rally America. The nation was reeling from days-long protests over the police killing of George Floyd, an unarmed Black man in Minneapolis, and the systemic racism that has long plagued the country.

Instead of addressing protesters’ calls, President Donald Trump had responded with his go-to “law and order” refrain a day earlier, just minutes after federal law enforcement tear-gassed peaceful protesters in front of the White House. Many in America — in the middle of a pandemic it was ill-equipped to handle — were frustrated, angry, and overwhelmed by its broken systems. If Biden wanted to prove he could be the leader to tackle inequality, now was the time to impart that message.

If Joe Biden wins in November, advocates who have spent the last four years suing President Donald Trump over his immigration policy are ready to hold the Democratic nominee accountable for his campaign promises.

Biden is positioning himself as former President Barack Obama’s natural successor, including on immigration policy. But he has sworn he won’t merely revert to the Obama-era status quo if elected.

When I asked Symone Sanders, a senior adviser to Joe Biden’s 2020 campaign, what the former vice president’s plan for his first 100 days in office was, her response was blunt.

“Wouldn’t everybody like to know?”

When it comes to foreign policy, Sen. Kamala Harris is very much the “simpatico” running mate Joe Biden was looking for.

Based on her Senate record, answers to questionnaires when she was a presidential candidate, debate remarks, and interviews with those who know her, many of her foreign policy views fall right in line with Biden’s.

Former Vice President Joe Biden spent decades in the Senate implementing many of the “tough on crime” policies increasingly criticized by the left, libertarians, and racial justice activists, especially in the wake of Black Lives Matter protests. But now Biden is running to dismantle much of that legacy with a sweeping, progressive criminal justice reform plan.

Biden’s plan was released before he became the Democratic nominee and before the Minneapolis police killing of George Floyd triggered a national reckoning over race and policing. But the plan, which Biden’s team told me is still his core criminal justice platform, nonetheless addresses many of the concerns raised by protesters not just about police but the criminal justice system more broadly — in a serious effort by Biden to align his views with a shift in crime politics, particularly among Democrats, over the past three decades.

In 2016, Hillary Clinton tapped Tim Kaine to be her vice president. In 2008, Barack Obama chose Joe Biden. In 2004, John Kerry named John Edwards. In 2000, Al Gore ran with Joe Lieberman. What did all these picks have in common? They were all to the right of the candidate atop the ticket — each of them was meant, at least in part, to mollify voters uncomfortable with either the ideology or the identity of the Democratic nominee.

Biden’s decision to run alongside Sen. Kamala Harris breaks the trend. Harris is, by any measure, to Biden’s left. The New York Times describes her as “a pragmatic moderate.” But according to the DW-NOMINATE system, which measures the ideology of members of Congress by tracking what they vote for and whom they vote with, Harris has been one of the most liberal members of the Senate since arriving in 2017, sitting reliably alongside Sens. Elizabeth Warren, Bernie Sanders, and Cory Booker atop the rankings. In Biden’s final term in the Senate, he was the 26th most liberal member — and the Democratic Party was significantly more conservative then.

Editor’s note, July 21, 2024: This story was last updated on August 12, 2020. For all of Vox’s latest coverage on Kamala Harris’s potential 2024 candidacy, see here.

Sen. Kamala Harris (D-CA) has earned the reputation of a rising star in the Democratic Party, most recently becoming former Vice President Joe Biden’s running mate in the presidential election. But Harris has also faced questions over her record on criminal justice issues — a record that’s led some critics to describe her not as a progressive reformer but as a relic of a “tough on crime” era going back to the 1990s and 2000s.

Editor’s note: On August 11, presumptive Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden announced Kamala Harris as his running mate.

Former Vice President Joe Biden is about a week away from announcing the name of the woman who will be his vice presidential pick.