2020 United States presidential election in Alabama

The 2020 United States presidential election in Alabama took place on Tuesday, November 3, 2020, as part of the 2020 United States presidential election in which all 50 states and the District of Columbia participated. Alabama voters chose nine electors to represent them in the Electoral College via a popular vote pitting incumbent Republican President Donald Trump and his running mate, incumbent Vice President Mike Pence, against Democratic challenger and former Vice President Joe Biden and his running mate, United States Senator Kamala Harris of California. Also on the ballot was the Libertarian nominee, psychology lecturer Jo Jorgensen and her running mate, entrepreneur and podcaster Spike Cohen. Write-in candidates were permitted without registration, and their results were not individually counted.
Prior to the election, all 14 news organizations making predictions considered this a state Trump would win, or otherwise a safe red state. In 2016, Trump won Alabama by a 27.72% margin, the largest margin for any candidate in Alabama since Richard Nixon's 46.89% margin in 1972. In 2020, Trump won the state with 62.03% of the vote to Biden's 36.57%, a margin of 25.46%, with Biden improving on Hillary Clinton's 2016 loss by 2.26%. This was the fifth election in a row in which the Republican nominee won over 60% of the vote in Alabama. A socially conservative Bible Belt state, Alabama has voted for the Republican candidate in every election since 1980 and has done so by double-digit margins in all of them except 1980, 1992, and 1996. The last time a Democratic nominee won the state was when fellow Southerner Jimmy Carter carried it in 1976, and it has not even given 40% of the vote to the Democratic nominee since 2000, when Al Gore of neighboring Tennessee managed to get 41% of the vote.
Biden's biggest victories were in Jefferson County, home to the Yellowhammer State's largest city of Birmingham; and Montgomery County, which encompasses the state capital of Montgomery. In addition, he easily won all 12 Black Belt counties. However, these victories were offset by Trump's landslide wins in the suburbs and exurbs of Birmingham, Mobile, Huntsville, and Tuscaloosa, and in rural areas. Barbour and Conecuh Counties, both of which voted for Democrat Barack Obama in 2012 but switched to the Republican column in 2016, remained red this year. Alabama weighed in as 29.91 percentage points more Republican than the national average in 2020.
Alabama was one of seventeen states where Trump received less percentage of the vote than he did in the 2016 presidential election. This election also marked the first time since 1992 that Alabama and neighboring Georgia did not vote for the same presidential candidate.
Alabama shifted 2.26% to the left from the 2016 election.
Primary elections.
The primary elections were held on Super Tuesday, March 3, 2020.
Republican primary.
As one of the Super Tuesday states, little campaigning has been done here, and the focus had been on the highly competitive Republican senatorial primary, which was expected to boost turnout.
General election.
Polling.
Aggregate polls
Fundraising.
According to the Federal Election Commission, in 2019 and 2020, Donald Trump and his interest groups raised $4,412,645.01, Joe Biden and his interest groups raised $2,412,420.93, and Jo Jorgensen raised $8,172.29 from Alabama-based contributors.
Candidate ballot access.
In addition, write-in candidates were allowed without registration, and their votes were not counted individually.
Electoral slates.
Technically the voters of Alabama cast their ballots for electors, or representatives to the Electoral College, rather than directly for the President and Vice President. Alabama is allocated 9 electors because it has 7 congressional districts and 2 senators. All candidates who appear on the ballot or qualify to receive write-in votes must submit a list of 9 electors who pledge to vote for their candidate and their running mate. Whoever wins the most votes in the state is awarded all 9 electoral votes. Their chosen electors then vote for president and vice president. Although electors are pledged to their candidate and running mate, they are not obligated to vote for them. An elector who votes for someone other than their candidate is known as a faithless elector. In the state of Alabama, a faithless elector's vote is counted and not penalized. 
The electors of each state and the District of Columbia met on December 15, 2020, to cast their votes for president and vice president. All 9 pledged electors cast their votes for President Donald Trump and Vice President Mike Pence. The Electoral College itself never meets as one body. Instead, the electors from each state and the District of Columbia met in their respective capitols. The electoral vote was tabulated and certified by Congress in a joint session on January 6, 2021 per the Electoral Count Act.
These electors were nominated by each party in order to vote in the Electoral College should their candidate win the state:
Results.
By congressional district.
Trump won 6 of 7 congressional districts. Trump's 81.2% in the 4th congressional district was his best performance of any congressional district in the country. Biden only won the 7th congressional district, a majority-African American district encompassing Selma and parts of Birmingham and Montgomery, but with 70.8% of the vote. These results were identical to the simultaneous House of Representatives elections.
Exit polls.
Edison.
The following are estimates from exit polls conducted by the Edison Research for the National Election Pool (encompassing ABC News, CBS News, CNN, and NBC News) interviewing 1,201 Alabama voters, adjusted to match the actual vote count.
Associated Press.
The following are estimates from exit polls conducted by the University of Chicago for the Associated Press interviewing 1,905 likely voters in Alabama, adjusted to match the actual vote count.
Analysis.
The Democratic Party dominated Alabama politics in the early 19th century. The party held an 84-year streak on the presidential ballot from 1876 and 1944, and did not vote for a Republican between 1872 and 1964. Congressional and local politics were effectively one-party systems as well even into the early 21st century. Yet, the Southern Strategy and realignment of political parties made the Republicans the prominent political party in the South as evangelical and southern whites realigned to the Republicans in response to Democratic support of Civil Rights legislation. Republican ascendance to the presidential ballot began in 1964, when conservative Barry Goldwater easily carried the state despite Lyndon B. Johnson's nationwide landslide. Johnson wiped out Goldwater in the rest of the country due to Johnson portraying Goldwater's views as anti-Civil Rights and pro-war, the former of which appealed more to Southern states. Thus, this election marked a turning point in Alabama politics, creating a Republican advantage that slowly trickled downballot. As a consequence, today, it is now one of the quintessential Republican states in the Deep South, and a Trump victory was near-guaranteed.
According to the Pew Research Center, Alabama is tied with Mississippi for the most religious state in the country: as of 2016, 77% of adults are "highly religious" and 82% believe in God. Just as with other Bible Belt states, the dominating white, evangelical population in rural and suburban areas more than offset any gains made by Vice President Biden. Biden did win Jefferson County, which encompasses the Yellowhammer State's largest city, Birmingham, by a margin of 13.15%. Birmingham was a potential host for the 2020 Democratic National Convention, but it was not chosen. The rest of the counties he won were in the Black Belt, a Democratic enclave in Alabama due to high proportions of African Americans. Highly fertile black soil made this area an epicenter for slavery in the days of the Solid South, and once these slaves were emancipated in 1865 and enfranchised in the 1960s, this collection of 12 majority-Black counties became solidly Democratic: seven of them gave 70% or more of their ballots to Biden, and two (Greene and Macon) gave him over 80%. However, the Great Migration saw most of these counties become rural and sparsely populated, with the exception of Montgomery County, home to the state capital of Montgomery.
Trump easily outperformed these wins with victories in every other metropolitan area and the Birmingham suburbs. He won, in order of population, Mobile, Madison, Shelby, Tuscaloosa, and Baldwin counties, all of which are heavy population centers with powerfully Republican suburbs. Nonetheless, Biden's performances in Madison County (home to Huntsville) and Shelby County were the best of any Democrat since that of Jimmy Carter in 1980. Trump also carried all rural counties outside of the Black Belt; 18 counties gave him over 80% of the vote.. He also carried the two swing counties of Barbour and Conecuh. Trump's largest margin was in the historically Republican Winston County, where he received 90.35% of the vote.
Per exit polls by the Associated Press, Trump's strength in Alabama came from 88% of white born again/evangelical Christians, which comprised 53% of voters. Protestant voters backed Trump with 75% of the vote, Catholics with 59%, and other Christians with 63%. Expectedly, Biden had his greatest strength among other religious groups, whom he captured 56–43, and nonreligious voters, who backed him 60–38. 59% of voters believed abortion should be illegal in all or most cases, and these voters backed Trump by 84–15. Other policy divides were also evident: 48% of voters supported COVID-19 restrictions over economic harm, while 50% supported the opposite. These groups backed Biden 68–30 and Trump 90–7, respectively. 70% of voters believed racism is a significant issue in American society, and these voters decided to back Biden 50–48, but were usurped by the other 30% of voters who believed the opposite and gave 94% of their support to Trump.
As is the case in most Southern states, there was a stark racial divide in voting in this election, with Trump capturing 78% of whites and Biden winning 91% of blacks. While Trump carried all gender, age, and education groups, Biden was most competitive among women (53% of voters, backing Trump 59–40), voters aged 18 to 29 (12% of voters, backing Trump 52–45), and postgraduates (11% of the electorate, backing Trump 53–44).
This election corresponded with the 2020 U.S. Senate election in Alabama, where incumbent Democrat Doug Jones – who was elected by a 21,924 vote margin in a 2017 special election – ran for a full six-year term but was defeated by Republican football coach Tommy Tuberville. Despite losing, Jones outperformed Biden by 5.1 percentage points.