US election 2020

On November 3rd - or before with early voting - Americans cast their ballots for the next US President. They also voted for members of Congress in elections for the Senate and the House of Representatives.

This dashboard provides an overview of the elections that took place, showing 2020 results as they currently stand, the final projections ahead of the election, and past results for the Presidency and Congress.

Click the 'Analysis' button below to view a graphics-led overview of what happened in the 2020 elections.

Presidency

It took several days for most media outlets to call the race, with several close states and the largest turnout in a century.

As of November 23rd, Trump has finally agreed to let his team begin the transition for Biden to take office. But the same day he reiterated his claims of electoral fraud, tweeting "we will keep up the good fight", and later "we will never concede to fake ballots & 'Dominion'".

Nevertheless, Joe Biden has won the Presidential race by obtaining a majority of 306 electoral votes to Donald Trump's 227.

Click the 'Electoral college explainer' button to find out more about how the American election system works, or the 'Build your own election' button to choose which way key swing states could have voted and create your own election scenario.

Explore the graphics below using the toggle button to switch between 2020 results, projections and 2016 results.

Source: Decision Desk HQ, 2020 election results. Last updated Wednesday 25 November 2020.

Senate

It's not all about the Presidential race. For a bill to be made into law, it must pass through both the Senate and the House. Therefore, having control of both parts of Congress in addition to the Presidency provides ultimate power in Washington - something the Democrats were hoping to gain in 2020.

The Republicans may have lost out on the Presidential race, but they did much better than expected in Congress. As of November 2020, five of the seven Senate races classed as toss-ups have gone to Republicans.

Majority control will now come down to Georgia's two crucial seats, to be determined by runoff elections on January 5th 2021. Republicans need just one for a majority, whereas the Democrats need both for a 50-50 split which would be broken in their favour by new VP Kamala Harris.

Click the 'Key Senate races' button to see the crucial seats in this year's elections.

Explore the graphic below using the toggle button to switch between 2020 results, projections and the previous Senate breakdown.

Source: Decision Desk HQ, 2020 election results. Last updated Wednesday 25 November 2020.
*The two Independent seats held by Senators Bernie Sanders and Angus King are shown alongside Democratic seats with whom they currently caucus.

House

The House of Representatives has 435 voting members, divided between states by population with each member representing one district.

The Democrats have retained control of the House with 218 seats and counting, but with several seats flipped to the Republicans, their majority will actually be smaller in the upcoming 117th Congress.

Explore the graphic below using the toggle button to switch between 2020 results, projections and the previous House breakdown.

Source: Decision Desk HQ, 2020 election results. Last updated Wednesday 25 November 2020.

Methodology

2020 results are sourced from Decision Desk HQ, correct to the date displayed below each graphic.

Projections are sourced from Cook Political Ratings, correct to the date displayed below each graphic. Electoral College Ratings are scraped from the PDF provided by Cook, using Tabula, while Senate and House projects are scraped using Python with BeautifulSoup. The scripts for Senate and House web scraping can be found in the GitHub repo for this project.

2016 Presidential results and electoral college vote counts for each state are sourced from the Federal Election Commission.

Information on the current breakdowns of the House and Senate are sourced from Congress.gov.

If you have any questions or would like more information about this project, please contact me at h.robertson@icloud.com.
Visit my portfolio website to view more of my work: h-robertson.github.io