Biden's popular-vote lead grows to more than 7 million as Trump continues to tweet electoral disinformation
John Haltiwanger
President-elect Joe Biden's popular-vote lead over President Donald Trump has grown to more than 7 million.
As of Friday, Biden led Trump by 7,048,542 votes, with 81,256,917 votes overall (51%) to the president's 74,208,375 votes (47%), according to Decision Desk HQ. Both candidates' vote totals shattered the record for a US presidential election, which former President Barack Obama held after he received 69,456,897 votes in 2008.
Biden has earned 306 electoral votes, putting him well past the 270 necessary to win the election. Trump's electoral-vote count stands at 232. The 2020 presidential election result will be finalized when the Electoral College votes December 14.
Though Biden's margin of victory continues to grow, Trump has still refused to concede more than a month after Election Day. The president has largely spent his final weeks in office spreading election disinformation on Twitter.
Trump has lost more than two dozen legal battles that he launched to try to overturn the result, leveling baseless claims that the election was rigged against him.
After an unusually long delay, the Trump administration formally authorized the beginning of the transition process for Biden in late November.
Trump is not expected to attend Biden's inauguration next month. In an interview with CNN, the president-elect said that it was "of no personal consequence to me" whether Trump attended but that Trump's absence would send a bad message to the world about the state of politics in the US.
Biden said Trump's presence at his inauguration would be "important in a sense that we are able to demonstrate at the end of this chaos — that he's created — that there is a peaceful transfer of power with the competing parties standing there, shaking hands, and moving on."
"I really worry about the image that we're presenting to the rest of the world," Biden went on to say. "And look where we are now in the world — look how we're viewed. They're wondering, my lord, these things happen in tinhorn dictatorships. This is not the United States."
By skipping Biden's inauguration, Trump would join a short list of outgoing presidents who did not attend the inauguration ceremonies of their successors: John Adams, John Quincy Adams, and Andrew Johnson.