McConnell congratulates Biden on his victory for the first time, while Biden is down in Georgia trying to claw the Senate majority away from him. It’s Wednesday, and this is your politics tip sheet. Sign up here to get On Politics in your inbox every weekday.
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.
On Politics is also available as a newsletter. Sign up here to get it delivered to your inbox.
Is there anything you think we’re missing? Anything you want to see more of? We’d love to hear from you. Email us at onpolitics@nytimes.com.