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Joseph Robinette Biden Jr.[b] (born November 20, 1942) is an American politician serving as the 46th and current president of the United States since 2021. A member of the Democratic Party, he served as the 47th vice president from 2009 to 2017 under President Barack Obama and represented Delaware in the U.S. Senate from 1973 to 2009.
3 days ago · Mr. Biden appeared surprised to hear the majority leader’s grim assessment: If a straw poll of Senate Democrats were held, he might get only five votes. By staying in the race, Mr. Schumer added ...
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- Overview
- Early life and career in the Senate
- Presidential runs and vice presidency
- Presidential election of 2020
- Presidency
Joe Biden is the 46th president of the United States (2021– ). Biden was born on November 20, 1942, in Scranton, Pennsylvania. He has a bachelor’s degree from the University of Delaware and a law degree from Syracuse University.
When was Joe Biden elected to the U.S. Senate?
Joe Biden was elected to represent Delaware in the U.S. Senate in 1972 at the age of 29, becoming the fifth youngest senator in U.S. history. He remained a senator until 2009.
When did Joe Biden receive the Presidential Medal of Freedom?
Vice President Joe Biden received the Presidential Medal of Freedom from President Barack Obama on January 12, 2017.
Joe Biden (born November 20, 1942, Scranton, Pennsylvania, U.S.) 46th president of the United States (2021– ) and 47th vice president of the United States (2009–17) in the Democratic administration of Pres. Barack Obama. He previously represented Delaware in the U.S. Senate (1973–2009). In April 2023 Joe Biden formally announced his bid for reelection as president in 2024.
Biden, who was raised in Scranton, Pennsylvania, and New Castle county, Delaware, received a bachelor’s degree from the University of Delaware in 1965 and a law degree from Syracuse University in New York in 1968. During this time he married (1966) Neilia Hunter, and the couple later had three children.
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After graduating from law school, Biden returned to Delaware to work as an attorney before quickly turning to politics, serving on the New Castle county council from 1970 to 1972. He was elected to the U.S. Senate in 1972 at the age of 29, becoming the fifth youngest senator in history. About a month later his wife and infant daughter were killed in a car accident, and his two sons were seriously injured. Although he contemplated suspending his political career, Biden was persuaded to join the Senate in 1973, and he went on to win reelection six times, becoming Delaware’s longest-serving senator. In 1977 he married Jill Jacobs, an educator, and they later had a daughter. In addition to his role as U.S. senator, Biden also was an adjunct professor (1991–2008) at the Wilmington, Delaware, branch of the Widener University School of Law.
Biden pursued the 1988 Democratic presidential nomination but withdrew after it was revealed that parts of his campaign stump speech had been plagiarized from British Labour Party leader Neil Kinnock without appropriate attribution. His 2008 presidential campaign never gained momentum, and he withdrew from the race after placing fifth in the Iowa Democratic caucus in January of that year. (For coverage of the 2008 election, see United States Presidential Election of 2008.) After Barack Obama amassed enough delegates to secure the Democratic presidential nomination, Biden emerged as a front-runner to be Obama’s vice presidential running mate. On August 23 Obama officially announced his selection of Biden as the Democratic Party’s vice presidential nominee, and on August 27 Obama and Biden secured the Democratic Party’s nomination. On November 4 the Obama-Biden ticket defeated John McCain and his running mate, Sarah Palin, and Biden also easily won reelection to his U.S. Senate seat. He resigned from the Senate post shortly before taking the oath of office as vice president on January 20, 2009. In November 2012 Obama and Biden were reelected for a second term, defeating the Republican ticket of Mitt Romney and Paul Ryan.
As vice president, Biden played an active role in the administration, serving as an influential adviser to Obama and a vocal supporter of his initiatives. In addition, he was tasked with notable assignments. He helped avert several budget crises and played a key role in shaping U.S. policy in Iraq. In 2015 his eldest son, Beau, died from brain cancer; Biden recounted the experience in Promise Me, Dad: A Year of Hope, Hardship, and Purpose (2017). Several months later, Biden—who enjoyed high favourability ratings, partly due to a candour and affable manner that resonated with the public—announced that he would not enter the 2016 presidential election, noting that the family was still grieving. Instead, he campaigned for Hillary Clinton, who ultimately lost the election to Donald Trump.
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Biden remained involved in politics and was a vocal critic of Pres. Donald Trump. Biden himself faced censure when, in 2019, various women accused him of inappropriate physical contact, notably hugging and kissing. Although his response was widely derided—“I’m sorry I didn’t understand more.…I’m not sorry for anything that I have ever done. I’ve never been disrespectful intentionally to a man or a woman”—his popularity remained high. Amid growing speculation that he would run for president in 2020, Biden announced his candidacy in April 2019, joining a crowded Democratic field.
Biden immediately became a front-runner, and he pursued a platform that was considered moderate, especially as compared with such candidates as Bernie Sanders. A poor performance in the party’s first debate in June 2019, however, raised questions about Biden, and his support dipped. After the first three nomination contests in early 2020, Sanders seemed poised to become the party’s nominee. However, worries about Sanders’s electability in the general election galvanized moderate voters, and in South Carolina in late February Biden won a resounding victory. Numerous candidates subsequently dropped out, and by early March it had become a two-man race between Biden and Sanders. As Biden registered more wins, he soon took a commanding lead in delegates. After the rapid spread of the COVID-19 pandemic in the United States stalled the campaigns, Sanders dropped out in April, and Biden became the presumptive Democratic nominee.
In the ensuing months Biden outlined a platform that included a number of policies that appealed to progressives. He notably supported government aid to low-income communities, ambitious climate change legislation, affordable child care, and the expansion of federal health insurance plans, such as the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, which had been enacted during Obama’s presidency. During this time Biden gained a somewhat sizable lead over Trump in nationwide polls, in part due to criticism of the president’s response to the COVID-19 pandemic, which had caused an economic downturn that rivaled the Great Depression. In August 2020 Biden chose Kamala Harris as his running mate—she became the first African American woman to appear on a major party’s national ticket—and later that month, he officially was named the Democratic presidential nominee. Although preelection polling had shown Biden with a significant lead in key battleground states, the actual contest proved to be much closer. Nevertheless, Biden and Harris succeeded in rebuilding the so-called “Blue Wall” through the Midwestern Rust Belt states, and on November 7, four days after the election, Biden secured the 270 electoral votes necessary to capture the presidency. Biden’s eventual electoral vote total was 306 to Trump’s 232; Biden won the popular vote by more than seven million votes.
Trump and several other Republican leaders subsequently challenged the election results, claiming voter fraud. Although a number of lawsuits were filed, no evidence was provided to support the allegations, and the vast majority of the cases were dismissed. During this time, Biden and Harris began the transition to a new administration, announcing an agenda and selecting staff. By early December all states had certified the election results, and the process then moved to Congress for final certification. Amid Trump’s repeated calls for Republicans to overturn the election, a group of Republican congressional members, notably including Senators Josh Hawley (Missouri) and Ted Cruz (Texas), announced that they would challenge the electors of various states. As the proceedings began on January 6, 2021, a large crowd of Trump supporters marched to the U.S. Capitol from a rally near the White House, where Trump had delivered an incendiary speech repeating false allegations of voter fraud by Democrats and urging his supporters to “fight like hell.” Overwhelming Capitol police, the rioters stormed the complex and vandalized and looted the interior, resulting in the deaths of five people, including one Capitol police officer (see United States Capitol attack of 2021). After several hours the building was finally secured, and Biden and Harris were certified as the winners. Two weeks later, amid a massive security presence, Biden was sworn in as president.
The 2020 election was marked by a historically large voter turnout, made possible in part by modifications in voting procedures initiated in many states to ensure that voters could cast their ballots safely amid the COVID-19 pandemic. Significantly more Democrats voted in the 2020 election than in previous presidential contests, and the Democratic Party not only won the presidential election but also maintained its control of the U.S. House of Representatives and took control of the U.S. Senate from Republicans, though only by the slimmest of margins (the resulting Senate membership was evenly divided between the two parties at 50 senators each, but tie votes could be broken by Vice President Harris, acting in her constitutional role as president of the Senate). In the view of many Democrats, particularly progressives, the party’s simultaneous control of the presidency and both houses of Congress afforded it a rare opportunity to pass transformative legislation that promised to make American society more democratic, equitable, and just.
During the first weeks of his presidency, Biden signed a raft of executive orders, actions, and memoranda, many of which rescinded policies of the Trump administration, particularly in the areas of immigration, health care, and the environment. Notably, on his first day in office, Biden issued executive orders that reentered the United States into the Paris Agreement on climate change and canceled the country’s withdrawal from the World Health Organization.
In March 2021 the Biden administration used budget reconciliation (a process that prevents certain budget-related bills in the Senate from being filibustered) to secure passage by Congress, without Republican support, of a $1.9 trillion pandemic relief bill, the American Rescue Plan. The law included, among other measures, one-time payments for lower- and middle-income Americans; extended unemployment benefits; an expanded child tax credit; financial aid to state and local governments, schools, and childcare providers; housing assistance; and additional funding for coronavirus testing, contact tracing, and vaccine distribution.
Biden supported three significant pieces of voting rights and electoral-reform legislation: the For the People Act, passed by the House in March 2021; the John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act, passed by the House in August; and the Freedom to Vote Act, introduced in the Senate in September. (The first two bills were later versions of legislation passed by the House in 2019.) All three bills were blocked in the Senate by Republican filibusters, which could be overcome only with the support of at least 60 senators. The bills were designed to prevent states from adopting egregious voter suppression laws, to eliminate partisan and racial gerrymandering, and to make elections more transparent by requiring “dark money” organizations to disclose their donors (see campaign finance; campaign finance laws). The failure of the electoral-reform measures, which Democrats viewed as essential to preserving American democracy, prompted progressive and even some moderate Democrats to urge the elimination of the filibuster, which is not established in the U.S. Constitution and can be ended by the Senate in a simple majority vote.
In August the Senate passed the bipartisan Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act, a drastically scaled-back ($550 billion) version of a wide-ranging infrastructure plan announced by Biden in March, its smaller scale made necessary by objections from Republicans and conservative Democrats to spending levels, tax increases on corporations and the wealthy, and several social spending provisions. The bill then languished in the House for months as progressive, moderate, and conservative Democrats debated its provisions, progressives refusing to support it except in combination with a larger social spending bill and conservatives insisting that it be voted on separately. In early November, following important off-year elections in which Democrats suffered several unexpected defeats—signaling a likely loss of the House and Senate to Republicans in the 2022 election—Biden and Democratic House leaders intensified their efforts to reconcile the factions, arguing that some tangible legislative achievement was necessary to retain the support of swing voters. After progressives finally conceded, the infrastructure bill was passed and sent to Biden for his signature.
On December 13, 2022, Biden signed into law the Respect for Marriage Act. The act formally repealed the federal Defense of Marriage Act (1996), which had defined marriage as a legal union between one man and one woman and had permitted states to refuse to recognize same-sex marriages performed in other states. Biden had also appointed as U.S. secretary of transportation (2021– ) Pete Buttigieg, the first openly gay cabinet member in American history who had unsuccessfully sought the Democratic presidential nomination in 2020.
3 days ago · CNN coverage of Joseph R. Biden, the 46th president of the United States.
Jul 21, 2024 · US President Joe Biden has ended his re-election campaign and endorsed Vice-President Kamala Harris to succeed him as the Democratic candidate, in an extraordinary decision that upends an already...
Learn about the life and achievements of President Joe Biden, the 46th President of the United States. Find out how he is restoring America's leadership, building communities back better, and investing in all Americans.
Mar 8, 2024 · President Joe Biden delivered an energetic State of the Union address, focusing on abortion rights, threats to democracy and the economy — while sparring with jeering Republicans.
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