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50 free Joe Biden trivia questions with answers — history quiz, new questions added Aug 2026.
Joe Biden was elected to the Senate at 29, too young to be sworn in, and buried his wife and daughter five weeks later. He commuted home to Wilmington by train for 36 years, survived two brain aneurysms, ran for president three times across 32 years, and finally won at 77 as the oldest person ever elected. Four years later a debate performance ended his campaign for a second term. This Joe Biden trivia quiz runs 50 questions across his life and career: Scranton and Claymont, Archmere football, the stutter, Syracuse law school, Neilia and the 1972 accident, Jill and the UN chapel wedding, Beau and Hunter, the Bork and Thomas hearings, the Violence Against Women Act, the Kinnock speech, the 1988 aneurysms, the Obama years, the 2020 primaries and Kamala Harris, the American Rescue Plan and Inflation Reduction Act, Afghanistan and Ukraine, Ketanji Brown Jackson, the classified documents, the June 2024 debate, the withdrawal, his cancer diagnosis and the nine actors who have played him on SNL. Easy questions come first; the last third is for people who remember J. Caleb Boggs. Every answer is verified against Wikipedia's biography of Biden, with the supporting sentence quoted under each question. Fans of this quiz should also try our US presidents and Barack Obama quizzes.
30 of 50 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01Joe Biden was which number president of the United States?
46th
He served from 2021 to 2025, after two terms as the 47th vice president under Barack Obama.
Q 02Biden represented which state in the U.S. Senate from 1973 to 2009?
Delaware
He was the first president ever elected from the state.
Q 03Biden was born in 1942 in which Pennsylvania city?
Scranton
The family lived with his mother's parents there before moving to Claymont when he was ten.
Q 04To overcome a childhood stutter, Biden memorised lines from which two writers?
Emerson and Yeats
He was a standout halfback at Archmere Academy and class president despite being, by his own account, a poor student.
Q 05Biden's father eventually found success in what line of work?
Used-car sales
Earlier business setbacks had sent the family from Garden City, Long Island, back to his wife's parents.
Q 06Biden earned his law degree in 1968 from which university?
Syracuse
He graduated 76th in a class of 85, and had earlier been failed in a course for plagiarising a law review article.
Q 07Biden's first elected office, won in 1970, was a seat on what?
New Castle County Council
He ran on a platform including public housing in the suburbs and opposed big highway projects.
Q 08Which Republican incumbent did Biden upset to win his Senate seat in 1972?
J. Caleb Boggs
He trailed by almost thirty points months out and won with 50.5 percent, thanks to a campaign staffed by his family.
Q 09How old was Biden when he was first elected to the Senate?
29
He turned 30, the constitutional minimum, two weeks after the election, making him the seventh-youngest senator ever.
Q 10Weeks after his 1972 election, Biden's first wife Neilia and their daughter Naomi died how?
In a car accident
Their two young sons survived; Majority Leader Mike Mansfield talked him out of resigning.
Q 11Biden's nickname "Amtrak Joe" came from commuting daily by train between Washington and which city?
Wilmington
He kept it up for 36 years, partly so he could be home for his sons each night.
Q 12Biden married Jill Jacobs in 1977 in a chapel belonging to which institution?
The United Nations
They met on a blind date in 1975 and honeymooned at Lake Balaton in communist Hungary.
Q 13Where did Joe and Jill Biden spend their 1977 honeymoon?
Lake Balaton, Hungary
An unusual choice at the height of the Cold War.
Q 21From 1991 to 2008 Biden co-taught a constitutional law seminar at which university's law school?
Widener
He did it as an adjunct professor while serving in the Senate.
Q 22Who did Barack Obama pick as his running mate in 2008?
Joe Biden
Biden's own 2008 presidential bid had never risen above single digits in national polls.
Q 23Biden's official residence as vice president was at what address?
Number One Observatory Circle
He took his second oath there in 2013 with Justice Sonia Sotomayor presiding.
Q 14Biden's son Beau died in 2015 of what?
Brain cancer
He had been the state's attorney general and an Army judge advocate in Iraq; his death shaped Biden's decision not to run in 2016.
Q 15Biden's daughter Ashley, born in 1981, works in which fields?
Social work and fashion design
Jill Biden also helped raise her two stepsons, who were seven and eight when she married their father.
Q 16Biden's 1988 campaign collapsed over alleged plagiarism of which British politician's speech?
Neil Kinnock
He had credited the Labour leader before but failed to on two occasions in August 1987.
Q 17In 1988 Biden underwent surgery for what life-threatening condition?
Brain aneurysms
He suffered a pulmonary embolism recovering from the first and needed a second operation in May, missing seven months of the Senate.
Q 18Biden chaired which Senate committee from 1987 to 1995, presiding over the Bork and Thomas hearings?
Judiciary
He later chaired Foreign Relations, where he backed the 2002 Iraq War Resolution.
Q 19Which 1994 law on domestic abuse did Biden draft and shepherd through Congress?
Violence Against Women Act
It was reauthorised again in 2013 while he was vice president.
Q 20Biden voted against which 1991 war but for the 2002 resolution authorising the Iraq War?
The Gulf War
He later called the Iraq vote a mistake.
Q 24Biden's 2017 memoir about the year of Beau's illness is titled what?
Promise Me, Dad
He and Jill reported earning more than $15 million from speaking and books between 2017 and 2019.
Q 25After finishing fourth in Iowa and fifth in New Hampshire in 2020, Biden's campaign was revived by which state?
South Carolina
He won by more than 28 points after strong appeals to Black voters, then swept most of Super Tuesday.
Q 26Kamala Harris in 2020 was the first major-ticket vice-presidential nominee to be what?
African American and South Asian American
Biden, then 77, called himself "a transition candidate."
Q 27At 78, Biden was inaugurated as the second Catholic U.S. president after whom?
John F. Kennedy
He was also the only president from the Silent Generation and the first since George H. W. Bush to have been vice president too.
Q 28Biden's first major law, a COVID relief package signed in March 2021, was called what?
American Rescue Plan Act
Bipartisan infrastructure and CHIPS bills followed in the same Congress.
Q 29Whom did Biden appoint to the Supreme Court in 2022, fulfilling a campaign pledge?
Ketanji Brown Jackson
She succeeded Stephen Breyer as the first Black woman on the court.
Q 30How many federal judges did Biden appoint, the most in a single term for 50 years?
235
Sixty-three percent were women and 60 percent non-white.