With votes still to be counted and no clear winner declared, Americans — and the rest of the world — anxiously await any news or signals that they’ll know, soon, who will lead them for the next four years.
However, one thing is already clear: the 2020 election had a historic turnout, and Democratic candidate Joe Biden has reaped the rewards, at least in terms of the popular vote.
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Even without the total ballots in, Joe Biden has surpassed Barack Obama’s popular vote record.
Obama set the record for votes received by a presidential candidate in 2008 when he racked up 69,498,516 total votes, according to the Federal Election Commission .
And while it has taken time to count all the votes, Biden has definitely beaten that record according to several media outlets. Fox News has Biden at a total of 69,551,307 total votes as of the time of writing, while The Guardian shows him at 69,552,120 so far.
However, given the historic turnout of this election, it’s expected that by the time all the votes are counted, President Trump will also have surpassed Obama’s 2008 record.
Statistician and editor of 538 Nate Silver predicts that in the end, Biden will have in the neighborhood of 80 million votes, while President Trump will have in the range of 73-75 million votes, which would be the two highest vote totals in history, he wrote on Twitter .
Even before Election Day, all signs pointed to a huge turnout this year.
With considerable early voting and mail-in and absentee ballots, more than 100 million ballots were cast before November 3, CNN reported.
At least six states — Texas, Hawaii, Nevada, Washington, Arizona, and Montana — had all cast more ballots before Election Day than they did in 2016.
Winning the popular vote doesn’t necessarily equate to winning the presidency, of course.
In 2016, Hillary Clinton won the popular vote by almost three million votes, but Donald Trump won the White House due to the Electoral College, in which he won 304 electoral votes to Clinton’s 227.
As MarketWatch reported, Biden could win the popular vote this year by as much as five percentage points and still conceivably lose the White House.
