Ally Action Project Week 20: 2020 Election Results

Joe Biden and Kamala Harris have won the US presidential election with the highest vote totals ever. While individual votes are still being counted, the Biden/Harris combination are ahead by over 4 million votes nationally. The total voter turnout was much higher this election with an overall increase of over 7 million votes over the 2016 election.

The president and vice-president-elect’s speeches on 11/7/20 addressed systematic racism and ranked it as a top priority for the new administration. Hillary Clinton did address systematic racism in her Democratic National Convention acceptance speech in 2016, but Trump famously denied the existence of the matter in a Kenosha town hall in September 2020, after the Jacob Blake shooting. The rise of this issue to prominence from a footnote in the 2016 election to a top priority is encouraging, and we hope to help keep finding actions to take to usher in a new era of equality.

There were also four state level ballot measure wins from the recent election that address equality:

Mississippi voted to replace their Confederate state flag.

Rhode Island voted to remove “Providence Plantations” from the official name.

Nevada & Utah voted to remove slavery as a criminal punishment.

Utah voted to remove gender-specific language in the state constitution and replace it with gender-neutral language.