Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden has set a record for votes cast for a presidential candidate, besting President Barack Obama’s performance in 2008.
By Wednesday morning, Biden had received 69,544,968 votes across the country, eclipsing Obama’s record of 69,498,516 votes in 2008, according to the Associated Press. Biden’s total beats the record of most votes recorded for a presidential candidate in history.
On Wednesday morning, FiveThirtyEight pollster Nate Silver, who consistently overshot Biden’s lead in several key battleground states heading into Election Day, predicted that Biden will win “around 80 million” of the more than 160 million votes expected to be counted.
For President Trump, the Associated Press recorded 67,120,277 votes as of Wednesday morning, over four million more than the 62,984,828 votes he received in the popular vote in 2016.
The popular vote is the total number of votes cast throughout the country and does not select the winner of the election. The winner is decided by the Electoral College, established in 1787. Trump lost the popular vote in 2016 to Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton by more than 2% but won a decisive electoral college victory.
As it stands now, the election is too close to call with vote counts continuing in a number of key battleground states such as Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Arizona. Republicans have contested Associated Press and Fox News predictions that Biden won Arizona on Tuesday night.
This year’s election marked the highest percentage of voter turnout among eligible voters in a U.S. federal election since 1900. According to Michael McDonald, a Florida professor who runs the United States Election Project, this year’s turnout rate was as high as 66.9%. In 2016, the project reported a voter turnout of 60%.
