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Turnout | 72.14% ![]() | |||||||||||||||||||||||||
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Elections in Illinois |
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The 2020 United States presidential election in Illinois was held on Tuesday, November 3, 2020, as part of the 2020 United States presidential election in which all 50 states plus the District of Columbia participated.[1] Illinois voters chose electors to represent them in the Electoral College via a popular vote, pitting the Republican Party's nominee, incumbent President Donald Trump of Florida, and his running mate, Vice President Mike Pence of Indiana, against Democratic Party nominee, former Vice President Joe Biden of Delaware, and his running mate, Senator Kamala Harris of California. Illinois had 20 votes in the Electoral College.[2] Prior to the 2020 election, all news organizations predicted Illinois was a state that Biden would win, or otherwise considered a safe blue state.
Biden carried Illinois, winning 57.54% of the vote to Trump's 40.55%, winning by roughly the same 17-point margin by which Hillary Clinton carried the state in 2016. Libertarian nominee Jo Jorgensen, a native of Grayslake, won 1.1% of the state's vote, with other minor candidates winning less than 1%. Biden's win in Illinois was largely the result of a lopsided 74.3% victory in Cook County, the state's most populous county and the home of Chicago. In fact, without Cook County, Trump would have won Illinois.
Per exit polls by the Associated Press, Biden's strength came from a coalition of key Democratic constituencies: he garnered 92% of votes from Blacks; 68% from Latinos, including 67% of Latinos of Mexican heritage; 53% from union households; and 50% of Whites.[3] Biden flipped McLean County (Bloomington-Normal) and Kendall County (in the Chicago metropolitan area), both of which had voted for Barack Obama in 2008, but then for Mitt Romney in 2012 and Trump in 2016.[4][5] Biden became the first Democrat since Franklin D. Roosevelt in 1944 to be elected president without winning formerly Democratic leaning Alexander County, solidifying its rural shift towards Republicans in elections; he also became the first to do so without carrying Fulton, Henderson, Henry, Knox, Mercer, Putnam, Warren, or Whiteside counties since Jimmy Carter in 1976.
Illinois was one of five states in the nation in which Biden's victory margin was larger than one million raw votes, the others being California, Maryland, Massachusetts and New York.