There are no obvious financial bubbles, and given the stock market expansion, consumers and investors appear confident about the long run.

In fact, since January, approximately 1 million local government employees have already lost their jobs. But it also means significant reductions in public services next year.

The next round of Covid relief must accomplish two things. First, it must extend the supplemental pandemic unemployment insurance that has sustained more than 10 million families since March.

Failure to replace state and local government tax losses will have damaging effects, deepening the downturn and potentially adding years to a full recovery.

The scope of tax losses could mean layoffs of teachers, firefighters and police across much of the nation.

Many investments could also reduce costs for local governments with more energy efficient buildings and lower transportation costs.

Still, the short-term economic damage from the pandemic will likely persist for several more years. And the long-term damage, particularly to children and young adults, may last for decades. Because of this, Covid-19 relief should be the first economic policy priority of the Biden administration.

While GOP resistance to this size of relief has been characterized as a bailout to poorly run states, that rhetoric is simply wrong.

the economic distress facing states is caused by the fallout of Covid, not fiscal mismanagement.

But we face the pandemic with the government we have, not the government we wished we had. So, a new relief bill should provide a good working example of compromise for the next administration

Most large American cities face significant congestion problems, and few roads have the necessary technology to accommodate smart vehicles.

The Biden infrastructure plan calls for $2 trillion of spending. This is more than earlier transit plans, but not out of range of all federal infrastructure spending over a typical five to seven year spending plan.

The House passed a version of pandemic relief with a $2.2 trillion estimated cost in the spring.

We still have rapidly rising health care spending, a counterproductive trade war that weakened US manufacturing and comprehensive immigration reform to contend with. We need longer term paths to constructive compromise.

Over the past few decades, the United States has moved away from federalism, where state and local government take a more active role in determining their own best course of action on many of our most divisive issues. This weakens our ability to craft compromises.

President-elect Biden faces an historically weakened economy and strengthening pandemic. He also steps into office in an age of deep political distrust. As he fights the economic fallout of Covid, he has a rare chance to resurrect the mechanisms of compromise that have served the United States well for 244 years.

But that thought is antithetical to the war Trump wants to wage in America between the suburbs and what he deems problematic “inner cities” and “Democrat-run cities” — code for where concentrations of Black people and other people of color live.

It threatens to strengthen efforts to disenfranchise Black voters and other voters of color who disproportionately vote for Democrats in the future.

“ensuring that Americans can have faith in this election and in all future elections.” As Jay Willis pointed out in The Washington Post, “Even after Trump’s presidency ends, that message will pave the way for G.O.P. politicians and judges to further one of their party’s and the conservative movement’s most important ongoing projects: restricting voting rights.” He continued: “Trump lost this election, but he can still help Republicans win in the future.”

Trump not only attempted to erase Black votes after they were cast, he attempted to suppress them before they were cast. This is nothing new among conservatives, but Trump has dragged the practice out of the back rooms and into the light of day once again, giving it a telegenic, digitally contagious persona.

As Eric Levitz pointed out in New York Magazine: “The G.O.P. is now a party that has no compunction about nullifying the voting rights of its opposition to retain power. And once a party has liberated itself from the shackles of respecting its detractors’ rights, much else becomes permissible.”

But we don’t talk enough about how for Black people and other racial minorities, this isn’t only about faith. For them, it’s about being able to participate in elections at all.

Republicans plan to challenge the counting of state Electoral College votes. This effort, too, is expected to fail. But it will provide yet another spectacle on a grand stage for the lie that Trump and his sycophantic courtiers have sown: that the political machine in liberal cities full of Blacks, hipsters, gays and gangs stole elections from the real Americans in the hinterlands.

What we are seeing unfold before our eyes is not about building trust in elections, it is anti-patriotic. It is not about ensuring that every legal vote is counted. It’s about attempting to legally limit whose ballots can be counted.

Trump is attempting to drag Jim Crow into the Twitter era.

Analysis of government data shows that just 6.7% of federal employees are under the age of 30 — compared with 20.6% of those in the employed labor force. That's even more problematic when you consider that about one-third of federal workers will be eligible to retire in the next five years.

We need talented young folks in government, not only to replace those coming to the end of their careers of service, but also to bring new skills that will help the country confront a wide array of public challenges and opportunities.

The administration should greatly expand its efforts to encourage talented college students to apply for paid internships at government entities.

The nonprofit Partnership for Public Service would provide initial staff and infrastructure to help facilitate the recruitment, selection and matching operations for the federal component to ensure that participants are placed in internships.

For the duration of the administration, the government could arrange about 20,000 internships a month at a time — for example, 400 dedicated to federal, state or city government in each state if distributed evenly.

Second, the program could be expanded through competition

Third, given their prior experience, participants in the internship program could have fast-tracked access to compelling projects upon completion of their college degrees

The program could include a mentorship component, pairing experienced leaders with prospective new talent, aimed at guiding participants in their work and encouraging and helping them pursue a career in public service

Challenges like protecting the population against pandemics and unwinding centuries of racial injustice will not be solved in the span of a single presidency, or even within a single generation. To tackle these and other challenges, the American government — and its ability to attract innovative talent — has to be built for the long haul. And we have to start building it now.

The president-elect has said the $900 billion fiscal rescue package proposed by a bipartisan group of Republican and Democratic senators is a good start. It probably isn't what his economic team would have designed if given carte blanche — that package probably would have included another round of stimulus checks to individuals, for example — but they understand that the priority is speed, and not necessarily size, as millions of Americans face eviction and the loss of unemployment insurance benefits in just a few weeks.

Powell has said more than once that lawmakers need to provide additional help to the economy, and that the risks of overdoing it are much lower than not doing enough.

Once the pandemic is over, it will take deft policymaking to get all the unemployed back to work anytime soon. Given the possibility of the Senate being under Republican control, the Biden administration could be engulfed in budget wars like those with which the Obama administration grappled

Biden will use executive orders as aggressively as Trump, in part to unwind much of what Trump did, and his economic team has the experience to do it efficiently.

A Republican-controlled Senate would make legislative wins tough to come by when Biden is president, and he will surely turn to executive orders to accomplish his goals.

From the trenches, Neera Tanden, who Biden wants as his director of the Office of Management and Budget (OMB), is well-suited to lead the charge. The OMB controls the government purse strings and thus policy priorities across the executive branch. Unless the OMB is on board with a government agency's plan, it won't get done.

President-elect Biden's most important long-term economic challenge will be to lift the financial fortunes of hard-pressed lower-income and minority households. Things were tough for these groups before the pandemic given the decades-long skewing of income and wealth distribution, and the virus has further undermined their finances.

If there is a gap in Biden's economic team it is that it lacks someone who has started or managed a business. Getting the economy back to a place in which all Americans benefit requires businesses to do well. This means economic policies also need to be considered from a businessperson's perspective. The new administration is sure to solicit many outside business voices, but policymaking would benefit from an experienced voice on the team.

The Covid-19 pandemic is sure to have long-lasting economic fallout. Just how long will depend in large part on the new president's economic policies. Judging by the economic team he has assembled, we are in good hands.

Nationally, the unemployment rate declined to 6.7% in November. Click the map to see the unemployment rate in your state.

Early in the pandemic, LinkedIn noticed a dramatic decline in the number of their users updating their job information, compared to a year ago — a sign that hiring had ground to a halt. Those numbers have recently improved.

Use the drop-down menu to see how dramatically small businesses have slashed work hours below the pre-pandemic norm in your state. The big drop on November 26 coincides with business closures on Thanksgiving.

Early in the pandemic, owners were reluctant to put homes for sale. But now, new listings are up again in many states, compared to last year. Sales are happening more quickly, too.

Americans are spending far less on their credit cards than they did before the pandemic.

Many restaurants shifted to takeout-only in March. And although many reopened in the months that followed, as of December, dining-in still remains well below normal in most states.

Hotels still have a glut of empty hotel rooms.

Some of the year's biggest winners are investors who closed their eyes and muffled their ears during the pandemic selloff and held onto their stocks. By the end of the year, their portfolio balances were looking pretty good

"This year was a year with a lot of reminders for investors: number one, don't overreact," Leo Grohowski, chief investment officer at BNY Wealth Management, told CNN Business.close dialogBefore Markets OpenStart your day smartGet essential news and analysis on global markets with CNN Business’ daily newsletter. Sign me upNo thanksBy subscribing you agree to ourprivacy policy.By subscribing you agree to ourprivacy policy.Before Markets OpenStart your day smartGet essential news and analysis on global markets with CNN Business’ daily newsletter. Please enter aboveSign me upNo thanksBy subscribing you agree to ourprivacy policy.By subscribing you agree to ourprivacy policy.Before Markets Open

The disconnect between Wall Street and Main Street will likely be a topic that follows us into the New Year.

The US economy is operating at 82% of where it was in early March, according to the Back-to-Normal Index from Moody's Analytics and CNN Business.

"Is it accurate to call this a coup attempt? ... Is President Trump betraying his oath of office? Are the lawmakers supporting him seditious? These words matter a lot right now," Stelter said at the start of his show.

A whopping 83% of Fox News viewers say Biden was not elected legitimately, according to a new Suffolk University/USA TODAY poll, but Snyder said that "unlike previous elections, we actually did have an election in 2020 that people around the world could admire."

Before Election Day, right-wing media outlets said "Trump would win and he would only lose if it was rigged," Stelter said. In the "MAGA bubble," the only people you hear from are "Trump supporters and experts who sound very smart," he added.

"You can be tested every time you cross a border. You cannot be vaccinated every time you cross a border," Thomas Crampton, chief marketing and communications officer for The Commons Project, told CNN Business.

Large tech firms are also getting in on the act. IBM (IBM) developed its own app, called Digital Health Pass, which allows companies and venues to customize indicators they would require for entry including coronavirus tests, temperature checks and vaccination records.

Early on in the pandemic, Apple (AAPL) and Google (GOOG) set aside their smartphone rivalry to jointly develop a Bluetooth-based system to notify users if they'd been exposed to someone with Covid-19.

"I think where exposure notification ran into some challenges was more of the piecemeal implementation choices, lack of federal leadership ... where each state had to go it alone and so each state had to figure it out independently," said Jenny Wanger, who leads the exposure notification initiatives for Linux Foundation Public Health, a tech-focused organization helping public health authorities around the world combat Covid-19.

"If we're successful, you should be able to say: I've got a vaccine certificate on my phone that I got when I was vaccinated in one country, with a whole set of its own kind of health management practices... that I use to get on a plane to an entirely different country and then I presented in that new country a vaccination credential so I could go to that concert that was happening indoors for which attendance was limited to those who have demonstrated that they've had the vaccine," said Brian Behlendorf, executive director of Linux Foundation.

A few companies within the Covid-19 Credentials Initiative are also developing a smart card that strikes a middle ground between the traditional paper vaccine certificates and an online version that's easier to store and reproduce.

CommonPass, IBM and the Linux Foundation have all stressed privacy as central to their initiatives. IBM says it allows users to control and consent to the use of their health data and allows them to choose the level of detail they want to provide to authorities.

"Trust and transparency remain paramount when developing a platform like a digital health passport, or any solution that handles sensitive personal information," the company said in a blog post. "Putting privacy first is an important priority for managing and analyzing data in response to these complex times."

"A point of entry — whether that's a border, whether that's a venue — is going to want to know, did you get the Pfizer vaccine, did you get the Russian vaccine, did you get the Chinese vaccine, so they can make a decision accordingly,"

The variance can be wide: the vaccine developed by Chinese state-owned pharmaceutical giant Sinopharm, for example, has an efficacy of 86% against Covid-19, while the vaccines made by Pfizer and Moderna each have an efficacy of around 95%.

It's also unclear how effective the vaccines are in stopping the transmission of the virus, says Dr. Julie Parsonnet, an infectious disease specialist at Stanford University. So while a vaccine passport app will show that you've received the shot, it may not be a guarantee that you safely attend an event or get on a flight.

Still, Behlendorf anticipates that the rollout and adoption of vaccine passports will happen rather quickly once everything falls into place and expects a variety of apps that can work with each other to be "widely available" within the first half of 2021.

Officials have differing opinions about how much change Times Square may be in for over the next few years — as new businesses inevitably replace old ones — and how long its full recovery will take. Real estate and tourism officials say estimates range between one and four years.

"2021 is certainly going to feel more upbeat than 2020 did, but I think there will also be some disappointment,"

Douglas Hercher, managing director at RobertDouglas, a private real estate investment bank. "If people are thinking Times Square, by the summer, is going to look like the Times Square we all know and love, that's probably not going to be the case."

A Times Square Alliance study found foot traffic in the neighborhood's busiest block on 42nd Street between Seventh and Eighth avenues was down 70% from the previous year.

Tompkins says about 43% of Times Square's street-level businesses are currently closed, down from 87% in the spring. Hercher estimates 25%-30% of retail rental spaces in Midtown have "gone dark" due to tenants shuttering indefinitely.

"You're going to see those retailers reducing their footprint to bring their costs in line with their sales. ... I think rental rates are going to have to come down tremendously to attract tenancy to those spaces."

Krispy Kreme, for example, opened its new flagship Times Square location in September, a few months after Covid-19 lockdowns caused a 78% drop in Manhattan retail sales activity, according to the Metro Manhattan Office Space blog.

Tompkins says the pandemic hasn't changed Times Square's appeal to retailers looking to create more-engaging shopping experiences for their customers. Luxury real estate developer L&L Holding Company has continued construction of its TSX Broadway experiential retail complex throughout the pandemic.

L&L managing director David Orowitz says the pandemic hasn't shaken the developer's faith in the $2.5 billion project, which is still set to open at the end of 2022.

"We've been really fortunate in that we raised the original capital for the project prior to Covid," Orowitz said. "At the end of the day, from the perspective of an entertainment and tourism Mecca, I think Times Square continues to evolve and will continue to be what it always was."

the normalizing of remote work options across business sectors this year has already led many companies to scale back on office space, which some analysts have predicted will be a permanent shift in the commercial real estate market.

"We've definitely seen in the residential market, rents have dropped 10-15% this year in Manhattan," he said. "That's probably a little bit of the canary in the coal mine."

Only 8% of Manhattan's estimated 1 million office employees returned to their offices for work by mid-August, according to a survey conducted by the Partnership for New York City.

"There's talk about whether it makes sense to make those into residential usage," he said. "The name of the game here in the Covid era is flexibility."

Still, a wide swath of congressional Republicans are siding with the President and plan to object to Biden's win during Electoral College counting on Wednesday -- even though their efforts will only delay the inevitable affirmation of Biden's win.

The shakeup put officials inside the Pentagon on edge and fueled a growing sense of alarm among military and civilian officials.

Cohen, a Republican who served as Secretary of Defense under President Bill Clinton, told CNN's Ana Cabrera on "Newsroom" shortly after the letter was published that the "highly unusual" step was warranted given the "unconstitutional path" Trump has taken the country.

"It was really our attempt to call out to the American people. We believe all of them are patriotic. They've been led down a path by President Trump, which is an unconstitutional path. And so we felt it was incumbent on us as having served in the Defense Department to say: Please all of you in the Defense Department, you've taken an oath to serve this country, this Constitution, not any given individual," he said.

"This final action is in keeping with the highest traditions and professionalism of the U.S. armed forces, and the history of democratic transition in our great country."

"So look. All I want to do is this. I just want to find 11,780 votes, which is one more than we have. Because we won the state."

"You should want to have an accurate election. And you're a Republican," Trump said at one point.

You're off by hundreds of thousands of votes."

The White House declined to comment to CNN.

"Respectfully, President Trump: What you're saying is not true. The truth will come out,"

He recently tasked the Georgia Bureau of Investigation with conducting an audit of the signature match system in Cobb County that determined the system was 99.9% accurate and revealed no evidence of fraud.

Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer seized on the call in a tweet Sunday afternoon, suggesting to Republican Sen. Ted Cruz of Texas that he and his GOP allies should investigate the President for his actions.

"You want to investigate election fraud? Start with this," Schumer, a New York Democrat, wrote in a tweet aimed at Cruz that included a link to the Washington Post's report about the call.

The first lady, who last month battled coronavirus, told the crowd of about 250 attendees, most of whom were wearing masks, that the media and Democrats are politicizing the pandemic.

"The Democrats, together with the media, have attempted to make Covid-19 the most politically charged, polarizing, and divisive topic of the last decade.

The numbers of coronavirus cases are surging across the nation, and medical experts, including those on the White House's own coronavirus task force -- Dr. Deborah Birx and Dr. Anthony Fauci -- have warned of the dangers ahead for Americans as winter looms and there remains no comprehensive federal plan for prevention.

Georgia, along with the other Sun Belt states, is likely to be among the fastest battlegrounds to report its results on election night.

Obama told the crowd he hadn't originally planned to come to the state, but he said he was told Georgia "could be the place where we put this country back on track."

He hammered Trump for suggesting Sunday night that he might fire Dr. Anthony Fauci, the nation's leading infectious diseases expert, after the election.

Obama's visit followed Biden's running mate, California Sen. Kamala Harris, visiting in Georgia on Sunday.

"All that we are looking to now in terms of Georgia and the prospect of what we might accomplish in this state, in large part, we have to say thank you Stacey Abrams for the work you have done," Harris said.

saying voters must "honor their ancestors" as she lambasted Trump's long history of racist comments and actions.

Trump, meanwhile, visited Rome, Georgia, on Sunday night, delivering his stump speech and making clear he expects to win the state for a second time Tuesday.

"I shouldn't even be here. They say I have Georgia made," Trump said.

Nikema Williams, the chairwoman of the Democratic Party of Georgia, said the state's evolution from 2016 -- with a network of female activists engaging starting in the 2017 House special election, through Abrams' party-building in 2018, and protests over racial injustice in 2020 -- has built the moment party loyalists there have been waiting for.

In addition to Georgia's 16 electoral votes at stake in the presidential race, Democrats are closely watching two Senate races in Georgia: Ossoff's challenge to Republican Sen. David Perdue, and a special election in which Democratic Rev. Raphael Warnock faces several opponents, including incumbent Republican Sen. Kelly Loeffler.

An adult female reported being pepper sprayed by an unknown person in a vehicle, according to the release.Read MorePolice responded to the assault to investigate and cleared the area, the release said.

No other injuries were reported and police are asking anyone who may have been injured or who may have videos or pictures of the incidents to reach out law enforcement, according to the release.

The monument has been the subject of controversy this year as many monuments honoring the confederate general have been removed.

At the time, Confederate statues were being removed across the country by officials and protesters alike, with some of the official removals being met by legal challenges, including the Lee statue.

Facebook’s app will also look different on Tuesday. To prevent candidates from prematurely and inaccurately declaring victory, the company plans to add a notification at the top of News Feeds letting people know that no winner has been chosen until election results are verified by news outlets like Reuters and The Associated Press

After the polls close, Facebook plans to suspend all political ads from circulating on the social network and its photo-sharing site

Twitter has also worked to combat misinformation since 2016, in some cases going far further than Facebook. Last year, for instance, it banned political advertising entirely, saying the reach of political messages “should be earned, not bought.”

In October, Twitter began experimenting with additional techniques to slow the spread of misinformation.

On Tuesday, Mr. Mohan plans to check in regularly with his teams to keep an eye on anything unusual, he said. There will be no “war room,” and he expects that most decisions to keep or remove videos will be clear and that the usual processes for making those decisions will be sufficient.

Twitter plans to add labels to tweets from candidates who claim victory before the election is called by authoritative sources.

Twitter will eventually allow people to retweet again without prompting them to add their own context. But many of the changes for the election — like the ban on political ads and the fact-checking labels — are permanent

For Google’s YouTube, it wasn’t the 2016 election that sounded a wake-up call about the toxic content spreading across its website. That moment came in 2017 when a group of men drove a van into pedestrians on London Bridge after being inspired by YouTube videos of inflammatory sermons from an Islamic cleric.

It has overhauled its policies to target misinformation, while tweaking its algorithms to slow the spread of what it deems borderline content — videos that do not blatantly violate its rules but butt up against them.

In September, Twitter added an Election Hub that users can use to look for curated information about polling, voting and candidates.

Starting on Tuesday and continuing as needed, YouTube will display a fact-check information panel above election-related search results and below videos discussing the results, the company said.

Many callers were alarmed that they had not received a ballot. For some, it was because they had not checked a box on their application for a mail ballot for the primary, asking to receive a general-election mail ballot. “There was a little wee tiny box on there to check,” she told one voter. “Don’t worry about it. Just go and vote.”

She told an upset caller that his ballot had been mailed on Oct. 16, two weeks earlier. “It’s kind of a long time if you haven’t gotten it,” she said. The voter could either visit Ms. Kuznik’s office to have the original ballot canceled and a replacement issued, or vote using a provisional ballot in person on Tuesday.

Ms. Kuznik said: “Yeah, I apologize, it’s been very, very busy here. But we will get you a ballot. We want you to vote.”

“Hold on for a minute,” Ms. Kuznik told a phone caller while helping Ms. Nason. “I’m right in the middle of processing a voter, and I will look up and see what’s going on with that.”

Many election analysts believe Pennsylvania is the knife’s edge on which the race is balanced, the closest of the three “blue wall” states where Joseph R. Biden Jr., if he sweeps them, has his most likely path to the White House.

“We’ll go as quickly as we can, but we’re not going to rush it,” she said. “It’s not the Super Bowl. Nobody’s going to hoist a trophy on election night.”

Biden’s campaign yesterday announced a last blitz of advertising across five media markets in Pennsylvania, drawing upon its strong financial advantage in the homestretch. Last week Biden spent $62 million on TV and radio ads, while the Trump campaign spent only $15.5 million, according to Advertising Analytics.

Biden released a list over the weekend of 817 bundlers, his campaign’s key fund-raising supporters, shedding light on some of the sources of his war chest and drawing another line of demarcation with Trump in the process.

Biden’s list was full of Wall Street executives, power lawyers and Hollywood producers, as well as his own longtime associates.

In Texas — where the number of ballots cast by late last week had already surpassed the total vote count in 2016 — the State Supreme Court yesterday rejected a Republican effort to throw out more than 120,000 ballots that had been cast at drive-through locations in Harris County, which is heavily Democratic.

In Texas over the weekend, the president’s supporters surrounded a Biden tour bus on the highway and slowed it down to as low as 25 miles per hour, yelling as they drove and prompting the campaign to cancel two events. Trump shared a video of the incident on Twitter, writing: “I love Texas!” Last night, he added, “These patriots did nothing wrong.”

But it is part of a growing culture of escalation that has federal law enforcement officials worried about the scenes that could play out in the event of a disputed or delayed election result.

“We are very concerned about groups lurking and trying to intimidate voters in particular communities,” said Kristen Clarke, executive director of the Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights Under Law, a group that works to ensure voting rights.

What that means is that Democrats, who have benefited from the state’s rising populations of college graduates, younger voters and minorities, are sure to loosen the Republican grip on power in Texas. What no one knows is by how much.

Traditionally, presidential elections provide clarity on how a party sees its political future.

Today, with both presidential candidates content to make the race a referendum on Mr. Trump, questions about him have overshadowed the debates raging within both parties over how to govern a country in the midst of a national crisis.

If Mr. Biden wins, progressive Democrats are preparing to break their election-season truce, laying plans to push for liberals in key government posts, including Senator Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts as Treasury secretary. If Mr. Biden loses, progressives will argue that he failed to embrace a liberal enough platform.

This year’s election seems likely to plunge both Republicans and Democrats into a period of disarray no matter who wins the White House.

“Nothing focuses the mind like a big election loss,” said Mr. Flake, who was one of many Republicans to retire in 2018 and who has endorsed Mr. Biden for president. “The bigger the better when it comes to the president.”

Rather than engage women or voters of color, the president expanded Republican margins with white, working-class voters, said Mr. Fleischer, a former press secretary for Mr. Bush who has come to embrace Mr. Trump after leaving his ballot blank in 2016.

Mr. Hawley argued that Republicans should embrace the populist energy of their voters by pursuing the breakup of big technology companies, voicing skepticism of free trade and making colleges more accountable for their high tuition costs.“If the party is going to have a future, it’s got to become the party of working people,” he said.

Democrats face their own divides over whether to use the moment of national crisis to push for far-reaching structural changes on issues like health care, economic inequality and climate change.

“I didn’t know at the time how much I really disagreed with Bush on some things,” Mr. Wurst said. “Look at what Mr. Trump has gotten done. I don’t like his tone, but sometimes you have to look at results.”

In Texas, a rising number of young, liberal politicians believe they can finally turn the conservative state blue by embracing a progressive platform.

“We want voters to know these sporadic incidents are being addressed, and we want them to be able to cast their ballot,” Ms. Clarke said.

Law enforcement authorities are increasingly worried, too — not just about what they have already seen, but also about what has been threatened, especially online.

Most of the internet threats have not migrated to the nation’s streets, according to a senior law enforcement official

Turmoil has defined 2020. More than 230,000 Americans have died of Covid-19; the economy has cratered, and racial tension has sparked unrest across the country.

Supporters waved Trump flags, leaned out of their vehicles wearing Make America Great Again hats and honked and cheered.

The supporters were spotted crossing the Mario M. Cuomo Bridge over the Hudson River in the city’s northern suburbs and bringing the busy Garden State Parkway in New Jersey at least partly to a standstill. Officials in New Jersey told a local newspaper that the motorcade stopped near the Cheesequake Service Area — about 30 miles outside New York City — and “backed traffic up for about five miles.”

All of this has created extraordinary uncertainty, with fears driven not only by the potential outcome of the election but by the tensions that might erupt in the days and weeks after Election Day.

“People are upset, and scared, and frustrated,” said Caitlin Foley, a physician in Philadelphia. “I think there will be unrest, regardless of whichever candidate is in the lead.”

A separate set of anti-Trump protesters marched in New York City to counter the pro-Trump caravans, leading to some scuffles and arrests.

In an interview on ABC, Jason Miller, an adviser to the Trump campaign, said that Republicans were ready for a legal battle over ballots that have not been counted by Tuesday. He claimed that Democrats expect President Trump to be ahead on election night, “and then they’re going to try to steal it back after the election.”

In Harrisburg, Pa., Annie Bravacos, 17, said she had felt a creeping dread about the election, and since she and her friends were too young to vote, they decided to canvass on a rainy Sunday afternoon.

“It’s easy to just get terrified about that, so just doing this, I guess, is what makes us feel better,” she said. “It’s, you know, we’re actually doing something, even if it’s small.”

“My ballot getting messed with? Yes. Me afraid to go somewhere? No,” said Mr. Carlisle, a 58-year-old building contractor, explaining why he refused to vote by mail or vote early.

The study reveals, for the first time, the genetic sequence of the virus that may have infected Mr. Trump and dozens of others, researchers said.

In a study released on Thursday, the C.D.C. cited genetic sequencing and intensive contact tracing that documented an super-spreading event at a high school retreat in Wisconsin.

The genomes believed by these researchers to be connected to the White House outbreak do not identify a recent geographic source, in part because they are unusual.

The results show that even weeks after it was identified, the White House outbreak would be better understood by sequencing samples of more people who were infected.

Viruses constantly mutate, picking up tiny, accidental alterations to their genetic material as they reproduce. Few mutations alter how a virus functions. But by comparing patterns of mutations across many genetic sequences, scientists can construct family trees of a virus, illuminating how it spreads.

But the Trump administration is not known to have conducted its own genetic analysis of people infected in the outbreak. The White House declined to respond to questions on genetic sequencing of Mr. Trump and the cluster of aides and officials who tested positive or became ill.

Scientists not involved in the research who reviewed the results agreed with the conclusion that the two samples sharing rare mutations strongly suggested they are part of the same outbreak.

“These genomes are probably going to be identical or nearly identical to the genome that infected the president,” said Michael Worobey, head of the department of ecology and evolutionary biology at the University of Arizona.

For months, the White House minimized the threat of the virus and eschewed basic safety precautions at official events, like wearing a mask or keeping people six feet apart.

At least 11 people who attended a Rose Garden celebration on Sept. 26 for Judge Barrett, which included an indoor event without masks, became infected with the coronavirus, including Mr. Trump.

The work is convincing, and it is the best way to piece together the progression of such an outbreak, said David Engelthaler, head of the infectious disease branch of the Translational Genomics Research Institute in Arizona, where he and colleagues have sequenced thousands of genomes to track the spread of the coronavirus, including devastating outbreaks at Native American reservations in the state.