the president vaguely threatened that Raffensperger could be prosecuted if he didn’t go out and “find 11,780 votes” to overturn the election results in Georgia. Raffensperger, who has repeatedly stood by the results, flatly refused to help.

“If someone believes the election wasn’t legit, and that voter then asks the logical question — ‘Well, if you want my vote to count, what are you going to do differently?’ — and Republicans don’t have an answer for them, it affects their enthusiasm,” Cahaly said. “My question is, can the Republicans overcome that? I’m not sure they can.”

With all eyes on Georgia, he has tried to make the secretary of state there into a villain

Casting a vote typically took longer in poorer, less white neighborhoods than it did in whiter and more affluent ones.

This analysis found that voters in the very poorest neighborhoods in the country typically took longer to vote, and they were also modestly more likely to experience voting times of an hour or more.

Most Election Day voters spent 20 minutes or less voting. But those in overwhelmingly nonwhite neighborhoods were more likely to experience the longest voting times.

“You know what they did and you’re not reporting it,” the president said during the call. “You know, that’s a criminal — that’s a criminal offense. And you know, you can’t let that happen. That’s a big risk to you and to Ryan, your lawyer. That’s a big risk.”

The president, who will be in charge of the Justice Department for the 17 days left in his administration, hinted that Mr. Raffensperger and Ryan Germany, the chief lawyer for secretary of state’s office, could be prosecuted criminally if they did not do his bidding.

Mr. Trump said he hoped Mr. Raffensperger’s office could address his claimed discrepancies before Tuesday’s Senate runoff election in Georgia, one that will decide the balance of power in the Senate.

Mr. Biden argued that Americans had come to more of a consensus on climate change, with people of all political stripes saying they recognize the need for more aggressive action.

“I respectfully suggest that I beat the hell out of everyone else,” he said, noting that he won the Democratic presidential nomination and seven million more votes than Mr. Trump. “I think I know what I’m doing, and I’ve been pretty damn good at being able to deal with the punchers. I know how to block a straight left and do a right hook. I understand it.”

But he added: “I’m ready to fight. But one of the things that happens is when you get into one of those kinds of blood matches, nothing gets done, nothing gets done.”

the president was “posturing to make himself, to bring himself back as the hero of the American people”

It started in 2012 with a group of protesters outside a McDonald’s demanding a $15 minimum wage — an idea that even many liberal lawmakers considered outlandish. In the years since, their fight has gained traction across the country, including in conservative states with low union membership and generally weak labor laws.

In 27 of these places, the pay floor will reach or exceed $15 an hour, according to a report released on Thursday by the National Employment Law Project, which supports minimum-wage increases.

President-elect Joseph R. Biden Jr. has endorsed $15 an hour at the federal level and other changes sought by labor groups, like ending the practice of a lower minimum wage for workers like restaurant workers who receive tips.

Janet L. Yellen, collected more than $7 million in speaking fees over the past two years from major corporations and Wall Street banks that have a keen interest in the financial policies she will oversee after her expected confirmation to lead the Treasury Department.

Ms. Yellen’s paid speaking appearances — which included $992,000 from the investment bank Citi for nine appearances — were among the lucrative payments from a range of Wall Street, Big Tech and corporate interests to three prominent prospective members of the incoming Biden administration.

Mr. Biden’s choice for secretary of state, Antony J. Blinken, was paid nearly $1.2 million by a consulting firm he helped found, WestExec Advisors, where he advised a range of corporations including Facebook, Boeing, the private equity giant Blackstone and the asset management company Lazard.

President Trump continued his assault on election integrity, baselessly claiming the presidential results and the Senate runoffs in Georgia were both invalid — which could complicate G.O.P. efforts to motivate voters.

the unfounded assertion that Georgia’s two Senate races are “illegal and invalid,” an argument that could complicate his efforts to convince his supporters to turn out for Republican candidates in the two runoff races that will determine which party controls the Senate.

But Mr. Trump has continued to make the false claim that Georgia’s election system was rigged against him in the Nov. 3 general election. Some Republican leaders are afraid that his supporters will take the president’s argument seriously, and decide that voting in a “corrupt” system is not worth their time, a development that could hand the election to the Democrats.

They turned out in record numbers. In Georgia, the increase in Asian-American voters was so significant in the general election that they could play a decisive role in the two Senate runoff races this week.

Demographics alone are not destiny. Asian-American voters and Latino voters made clear that while they generally support Democrats, they do not do so at the same rate as Black voters, and remain very much up for grabs by either party.

but with Asian-Americans making up less than 6 percent of the U.S. population, concentrated mostly in traditionally safe blue and red states like California, New York and Texas, they were seldom part of a presidential campaign’s calculus.

The vice president, the statement continued, “welcomes the efforts of members of the House and Senate to use the authority they have under the law to raise objections and bring forward evidence before the Congress and the American people on Jan. 6th.”

Representative Mo Brooks, Republican of Alabama, has said he will object to certifying the results, and with Mr. Hawley’s support, that challenge would hold weight, prompting senators and representatives to retreat to their chambers on opposite sides of the Capitol for a two-hour debate and then a vote on whether to disqualify a state’s votes. Both the Democratic-controlled House and Republican-controlled Senate would have to agree to toss out a state’s electoral votes — something that has not happened since the 19th century and is not expected to this time.

“A fair and credible audit — conducted expeditiously and completed well before Jan. 20 — would dramatically improve Americans’ faith in our electoral process and would significantly enhance the legitimacy of whoever becomes our next president,” they wrote. “We are acting not to thwart the democratic process, but rather to protect it.”

surveys have consistently found that about 70 percent to 80 percent of Republicans don’t buy the results. They don’t agree that Joe Biden won fair and square. They say the election was rigged. And they say enough fraud occurred to tip the outcome.

Research has shown that the answers that partisans (on the left as well as on the right) give to political questions often reflect not what they know as fact, but what they wish were true.

She suggested, however, that these results be taken with something between alarm and skepticism.

Though China’s vaccine candidates have not formally been proved safe or effective, officials have been injecting them into thousands of people across the country, ostensibly under an emergency-use policy. One such campaign, his friends said, was underway in the city of Yiwu in eastern China.

And he expressed little worry that the substance that had been injected into his arm is still in the testing phase, an attitude that is stirring worry among global health experts.

“Since they’ve started using it on some people on an emergency-use basis, it shows that there’s a certain guarantee.”

Over time, some of the volunteers got sick with Covid-19. To get a preliminary sense of how the trial was going, an independent board of experts took a look at the first 95 participants who got sick. Ninety of them had received the placebo, and only five had been given the vaccine. Based on that data, the board estimated that the vaccine is 94.5 percent effective.

The soonest that coronavirus vaccines could possibly become widely available would be in the spring. But if effective vaccines do indeed become available — and if most people get them — the pandemic could drastically shrink. As coronavirus infections became rarer, life could gradually return to normal.

Out of the 95 people who got sick in the Moderna study, 11 experienced severe disease. None of those 11 people were vaccinated. In other words, the five vaccinated people who got sick experienced only mild symptoms, and all of the severe cases were participants from the placebo group.

And most polls underestimated President Trump’s strength, in Iowa, Florida, Michigan, Texas, Wisconsin and elsewhere. Instead of winning a landslide, as the polls suggested, Joseph R. Biden Jr. beat Mr. Trump by less than two percentage points in the states that decided the election.

“This was a bad year for polling,” David Shor, a data scientist who advises Democratic campaigns, said. Douglas Rivers, the chief scientist of YouGov, a global polling firm, said, “We’re obviously going to have a black eye on this.”

This year’s misleading polls had real-world effects, for both political parties. The Trump campaign pulled back from campaigning in Michigan and Wisconsin, reducing visits and advertising, and lost both only narrowly. In Arizona, a Republican strategist who worked on Senator Martha McSally’s re-election campaign said that public polling showing her far behind “probably cost us $4 or $5 million” in donations. Ms. McSally lost to Mark Kelly by less than three percentage points.