Biden Rallies Democrats in Georgia

Where things stand

• Joe Biden knows that the fate of his legislative agenda runs directly through Georgia, and its Senate runoff elections next month — which is why he traveled to the Peach State yesterday to campaign alongside the two Democratic candidates, the Rev. Raphael Warnock and Jon Ossoff.

• “Tell your friends, your family, just like you did in November,” Biden said at a rally in Atlanta, referring to his own victory in Georgia in the general election. “Turn out the vote so that it’s not even close.”

• Ossoff is facing Senator David Perdue, a one-term incumbent, and Warnock is taking on Senator Kelly Loeffler, who was appointed last year to the seat vacated by former Senator Johnny Isakson.

• In-person early voting began on Monday. Including both absentee ballots returned and votes cast early in person, close to half a million votes have already been cast, according to official statistics collated by the U.S. Elections Project.

• Roughly five million votes were cast in Georgia during the general election. With hundreds of millions of dollars already invested in the two Senate races, and voting reminders plastered digitally and physically all over the state, observers are holding their breath to see whether turnout comes anywhere near the record high during the general election.

• Biden plans to bring on Pete Buttigieg, a former rival for the Democratic nomination whose endorsement in March helped give Biden a needed push, to serve as transportation secretary, his team announced.

• And Biden will nominate Jennifer Granholm, the former governor of Michigan and a longtime proponent of clean energy development, as the secretary of energy, people close to the transition team said. In that position she would also be in charge of managing the country’s nuclear arsenal.

• It makes sense that these announcements emerged in tandem yesterday: A modernized transportation infrastructure and a green economy are major pillars of Biden’s plans to “Build Back Better.”

• If confirmed, Buttigieg would be the first openly gay member of a presidential cabinet. He would also bring an uncommonly low level of experience to a job that involves managing 55,000 employees — more than half the size of the city he governed as mayor of South Bend, Ind.

• Mitch McConnell, the majority leader, congratulated Biden on his victory during remarks on the Senate floor yesterday, ending more than a month of standing aside quietly as President Trump pushed a campaign of disinformation. A majority of the Republican Party’s rank-and-file voters now say that the election was stolen, polls have shown.

• The remarks came a day after the Electoral College voted to make Biden the country’s 46th president. McConnell is now leading a pressure campaign to persuade his fellow Republican legislators not to contest Biden’s victory when Congress takes up the Electoral College’s vote next month.

• He hopes to avoid a public spectacle of Republican dissension on Jan. 6, when the party’s lawmakers in both houses of Congress will be forced to decide whether to side with Trump in continuing to contest the election outcome.

• “Many of us hoped that the presidential election would yield a different result, but our system of government has processes to determine who will be sworn in on Jan. 20,” McConnell said. “The Electoral College has spoken. So today, I want to congratulate President-elect Joe Biden.”

• Anthony Fauci, the nation’s top infectious disease expert, said yesterday that Biden and Kamala Harris, the vice president-elect, should receive a coronavirus vaccine as soon as possible.

• “For security reasons, I really feel strongly that we should get them vaccinated,” Fauci said on “Good Morning America,” adding, “You want him fully protected as he enters into the presidency in January.”

• He said Trump and Vice President Mike Pence should also be vaccinated. Even though Trump was infected with the virus and probably has antibodies, Fauci said, “to be doubly sure, I would recommend that he get vaccinated as well as the vice president.”

• The administration drew some criticism this week for a reported plan to administer vaccines to numerous West Wing staff members, but it later rolled back that initiative. Kayleigh McEnany, the White House press secretary, said yesterday that for now, “a very limited group of people” would receive the vaccine.

• The Food and Drug Administration is moving to authorize emergency use of a second vaccine for the virus on Friday, people familiar with the plans said. The F.D.A. released new data yesterday on the vaccine, created by Moderna, which showed it to be safe and highly effective against the coronavirus.

• The F.D.A. said its analysis “supported a favorable safety profile, with no specific safety concerns identified that would preclude issuance of an emergency use authorization.”

• The Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine, which was cleared last week, is mostly being administered to frontline health care workers for the time being, as total virus deaths in the country passed 300,000 this week.

• The White House has purchased enough doses to vaccinate 50 million people, but over the summer, it turned down the opportunity to purchase more than that, leading to fears of a shortage if enough other vaccines don’t come online.

• McEnany said yesterday that the administration was in talks with Pfizer to receive another shipment that would double the amount of available vaccines, saying the White House was “hopeful” that a deal would be made.

Photo of the day

Supporters gathered on the route for Biden’s motorcade in Atlanta as he campaigned for the Democratic Senate candidates in Georgia.

What it was like to be the only Republican on Philadelphia’s elections board this year.

Until this year, being a member of a county board of elections was a fairly low-key bureaucratic role.

But this year, as James Verini shows in his profile of Al Schmidt, the only Republican on the Philadelphia County Board of Elections, doing your job also meant withstanding death threats while making momentary decisions that could affect the entire country’s view of the election results. And Schmidt put in many sleepless nights while he was at it.

As they went through the process, officials counting (and recounting) ballots worked in the Philadelphia convention center, where they were entombed from the outside world in a windowless hangar. James writes of Schmidt:

The convention center started to remind him of certain settings, none of them pleasing: a casino, a tomb. “We’re in this enormous room,” he said. “It has no windows. Everyone’s working day and night. And there’s all sorts of things going on in the outside world. You don’t know if it’s dark, you don’t know if it’s light. It’s very disorienting. And it’s also a bit like you’re in a fortress, because we have all this security, and you’re under siege by political actors on the outside.”

At the same time, Schmidt was on Twitter, pushing back against the president’s false claims that he had won Pennsylvania. Read on in The Times Magazine for the full profile, which follows Schmidt through the tumultuous election process.

DealBook: How to revive the economy

As part of the DealBook D.C. Policy Project, The Times gathered a virtual panel of experts early this month to debate the priorities for economic policy in the months and years ahead. The consensus was that a huge aid package is necessary to keep households and businesses afloat.

Read more and watch videos of the discussion.