Biden vs. Trump: Live Updates for the 2020 Election

Trump faces a tough landscape as coronavirus cases continue to surge.

A Senate runoff election in Alabama that is unusually personal for President Trump.

Republican National Convention planning in Florida that is overshadowed by the coronavirus outbreak.

Primary runoffs in Texas — as well as a new poll showing former Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr. ahead of Mr. Trump in the state.

And spikes in Covid-19 cases in G.O.P.-led states from southeast to southwest.

Republicans are facing major decisions this week across the Sun Belt as the party tries to chart a course through a political moment defined not just by health and economic crises but also the unsteady and increasingly unpopular leadership of Mr. Trump.

The landscape for the president is so tough right now that Democrats are even encouraging Mr. Biden, Mr. Trump’s opponent, to press his advantage and compete aggressively in traditionally Republican states like Georgia and Texas.

With 16 weeks to go until the general election on Nov. 3, The Times is expanding its live coverage of the campaigns for president, House and Senate, and governor, as well as coverage of voters, politics and policy across the nation.

Our reporters will be delivering daily updates, news and analysis on all the major races and political dimensions, including voting rights and mail-in voting, the protests against systemic racism and social injustice, and the repercussions of the virus and the devastated economy on the nation’s politics.

The Sun Belt is drawing particular attention this week, with Alabama Republicans deciding a Senate runoff on Tuesday between Jeff Sessions, Mr. Trump’s former attorney general, and Tommy Tuberville, a former Auburn University football coach.

Mr. Trump has endorsed Mr. Tuberville against his onetime ally, Mr. Sessions, who the president came to despise for recusing himself from the investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 election. Most polls in Alabama close at 8 p.m. Eastern on Tuesday.

Texas also has primary runoffs on Tuesday for several key House seats, as well as a Democratic Senate primary runoff between M.J. Hegar and state Senator Royce West; the winner will face Senator John Cornyn in November. In Maine, Democrats will choose a nominee on Tuesday to face Senator Susan Collins, with Sara Gideon, the speaker of the Maine House, widely seen as the likely winner.

In Florida, state officials on Sunday reported the highest single-day total of new coronavirus cases by any state since the start of the pandemic, with more than 15,000 new infections. (New York had recorded the previous high of 12,274 on April 4.) New cases are increasing across the Sun Belt, as this map shows, and Republican governors like Ron DeSantis of Florida and Greg Abbott of Texas face criticism for their decisions to begin reopening their states weeks ago.

More than a dozen Republican National Committee members from across the country told The Times in interviews that they were still planning to attend the party’s convention next month in Florida, despite the surge in cases.

President Trump last month moved the convention from Charlotte, N.C., to Jacksonville, Florida’s largest city, because Gov. Roy Cooper of North Carolina refused to guarantee a late-August arena party free of social distancing. Several of the R.N.C. members interviewed are planning to first go to Charlotte, where the party’s delegates will conduct much of their official business, before relocating to Jacksonville for the big party so desired by Mr. Trump.

“It’s a risk you have to take,” said Morton Blackwell, 80, an R.N.C. member from Virginia who has attended every party convention since he was the youngest elected delegate backing Barry Goldwater in 1964. “You take risks every day. You drive down the street and a cement truck could crash into you. You can’t not do what you have to do because of some possibility of a bad result.”

Art Wittich, 62, an R.N.C. member from Montana, said he had a “duty” to travel to Charlotte and Jacksonville to nominate and support Mr. Trump.

“It is not only my duty, but also my honor go to Charlotte and Jacksonville to re-elect President Trump,” he said. “As such, I am willing to assume any risk to do so.”

While a handful of Republican senators who are occasionally skeptical of Mr. Trump — Mitt Romney of Utah, Lisa Murkowski of Alaska and Susan Collins of Maine, to name three — have announced they won’t go to Jacksonville, there is very little appetite among party regulars to slim the festivities to less than the planned three nights or switch to a virtual convention, as Democrats have for their event in Milwaukee, which was originally slated to start this week. It is now scheduled to take place in mid-August without delegates present.

The conditions that led Mr. Trump to move the convention out of North Carolina now apply equally to Florida. Jacksonville officials late last month said they would require convention attendees to wear face masks, though there has been no word yet on restricting how many people can fit inside the city’s VyStar Veterans Memorial Arena. Republican officials are also considering hosting some of the convention outdoors at the city’s football or minor-league baseball stadiums.

Of course, it does tend to get hot and humid in Florida in late August.

R.N.C. members interviewed said they had little hesitancy about joining what, as of now, is still planned as an arena full of Trump supporters cheering his nomination.

“If I can safely go to Walmart or a restaurant, I am confident we can safely gather to conduct the important business of the Republican Party renominating the president and vice president,” said Henry Barbour, an R.N.C. member from Mississippi. “We were prepared to work with folks in North Carolina to make it safe, and that is exactly what the R.N.C. is doing in Jacksonville.”

Jeff Sessions, trailing in the Alabama polls, says his campaign is ‘electrified.’

MOBILE, Ala. — Jeff Sessions, the Alabama Republican and former attorney general who is trying to reclaim his old Senate seat, was making his final appeal to voters on Monday before Tuesday’s runoff election against Tommy Tuberville, the former Auburn football coach.

There has been little public polling in the race, but by several indications, Mr. Sessions faces an uphill battle. He finished behind Mr. Tuberville by about 12,000 votes in March, when voters first went to the polls.

In both public and private polling conducted for the Sessions campaign since, Mr. Sessions has been consistently down, apparently unable to repair the damage that President Trump has inflicted on his reputation with repeated attacks over how Mr. Sessions recused himself from the Justice Department investigation into Russia’s election interference.

The latest public poll in the race, conducted during the first and second week of July by Auburn University at Montgomery, showed Mr. Sessions trailing by double digits, even as Mr. Tuberville faced new questions about his involvement in a hedge fund that turned out to be a fraud.

The poll found Mr. Tuberville ahead 47 percent to 31 percent. Still, a considerable portion of the people surveyed — 22 percent — said they had not made up their minds.

Mr. Sessions said in a brief interview on Monday afternoon that his recent appearance on “Tucker Carlson Tonight” had “electrified” his campaign. He appeared last Tuesday on Mr. Carlson’s Fox News show, where the host praised the Republican as “one of the very few politicians I do respect.”

“We had $30,000 — small-dollar contributions — come in right after that,” Mr. Sessions said in between conversations with voters at a Cracker Barrel in Mobile.

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Mr. Sessions declined to answer directly whether he would support Mr. Tuberville in the general election in the event that he does not win the runoff race against him. But he criticized his opponent for his regular refusal to engage with the news media.

“I’d like for y’all to ask Tommy Tuberville of that,” Mr. Sessions told reporters. “What’s he going to — who’s he going to support after the runoff if he loses? Where is he? He’s not available. He’s been hiding out now for two weeks.”

“Look, I’m a strong Republican,” Mr. Sessions added. “We need to win this seat.”

R.N.C. official tweets, and then deletes, a photo of Biden and his young son at a Redskins game.

A spokesman for the Republican National Committee on Monday tweeted and then deleted a photograph showing one of Joseph R. Biden Jr.’s sons, then a young child, wearing a Washington Redskins hat, in the latest example of disjointed Republican efforts to define the presumptive Democratic nominee.

“Hey Joe Biden, are you still a Redskins fan?” wrote Steve Guest, the R.N.C. official, before deleting the tweet amid online backlash.

His remark came on the same day that the football team announced it would retire its name, which is considered a racial slur. President Trump has expressed support for the moniker and complained that the name change was being considered “in order to be politically correct.”

The moment highlighted how Republicans have careened between seeking to tie Mr. Biden, 77, to the most progressive elements of his party, and seizing on his age and lengthy political record to cast him as out-of-touch with his party’s zeitgeist.

Mr. Guest did not immediately respond to an email seeking comment. Several Twitter users posted screenshots of his tweet after he had deleted it.

Whatever Mr. Guest’s strategic intention, the effect online was to remind many of Mr. Biden’s history of family tragedy, a subject that Mr. Biden has often used to connect with grieving voters.

In the photograph, Mr. Biden holds one young son, who wears the team-logo hat, with his head turned toward another son. A Biden campaign official estimated that the photograph was taken around 1974, and did not say which son was wearing the hat.

In 1972, Mr. Biden lost his first wife and a baby daughter in a car crash, while his two sons, Beau and Hunter, suffered injuries. Mr. Biden was sworn in to the Senate a few months after the accident at the hospital as they recovered.

Decades later, Beau Biden died of brain cancer.

The D.N.C.’s ‘war room’ is the tip of the spear to attack Trump.

Democrats are expanding their attacks against President Trump, adding new firepower to their offensive operation as the campaign barrels into the final fall stretch.

At the direction of the Biden campaign, the party is expanding the Democratic National Committee “war room,” a 35-person operation that was started in 2017. The group will become the central Democratic clearinghouse for attacking the incumbent president, a challenge Democrats last faced in 2004.

Led by Adrienne Watson and Nick Bauer, two operatives who’ve been focused on attacking Mr. Trump since the fall of 2015, the war room is planning to expand its advertising effort and bring in aides who worked for some of this year’s Democratic presidential candidates.

Biden staffers say the decision to run a key campaign operation out of the party committee reflects the remote nature of campaigning during a pandemic, a desire to conserve campaign dollars and the expertise built up at the committee over the past four years.

The D.N.C.’s ads and messaging portray Mr. Trump as undone by his own narcissism, prioritizing his political interests and ego over the kind of expertise needed to battle a deadly pandemic.

In recent weeks, Mr. Trump seems to be sustaining the most damage from self-inflicted wounds. But Ms. Watson said Democrats cannot count on Mr. Trump defeating himself, pointing to plenty of other examples — like the release of the “Access Hollywood” tape in 2016 — when Democrats began writing his political obituary.

“The truth is that Trump has never imploded on his own,” she said.

Texas Supreme Court rules against the state G.O.P. holding an in-person convention.

In Texas, where the number of infections and deaths have spiked in recent weeks, the State Supreme Court dismissed a lawsuit on Monday that had been filed by Republicans over the cancellation of their state party convention.

The court, an elected body made up entirely of Republicans, ruled 7 to 1 that while the Republican Party of Texas had a constitutional right to hold a convention in person, it did not extend to forcing a convention center to host the gathering during a pandemic.

“The Party argues it has constitutional rights to hold a convention and engage in electoral activities, and that is unquestionably true,” the court’s majority wrote. “But those rights do not allow it to simply commandeer use of the Center.”

The convention had been scheduled to start on Monday at the George R. Brown Convention Center in Houston and run until Saturday.

But the Houston First Corporation, directed by the city’s mayor, Sylvester Turner, a Democrat, terminated a licensing agreement last week for the use of the convention center by the state Republican Party. The corporation, a government entity that manages several city-owned buildings, cited “the unprecedented scope and severity of the Covid-19 epidemic in Houston.”

Harris County, which includes Houston, is one of the areas in the country hit hardest by the resurgent virus. On Monday, Mr. Turner, the city’s mayor, proposed a two-week shutdown to blunt the progress of the pandemic.

The state Republican Party sued the Houston First Corporation, contending that the city-run convention center had breached the terms of its agreement. Later on Monday, the state Republican Party announced that it would vote on whether to hold its convention online.

The state G.O.P. chairman, James Dickey, said in a statement on Monday that the cancellation was politically motivated.

“We believe that Mayor Turner used his control of city-owned property to disenfranchise Republicans and attempt to deny them the opportunity to cast their votes for national delegates and electors in-person in Houston,” he said.

A new poll shows Biden leading in Texas.

Could Texas really be in play for Joseph R. Biden Jr.? It’s a question political observers — and even the Biden campaign — are intensely debating.

On Sunday, a Dallas Morning News poll showed Mr. Biden had the support of 46 percent of the state’s registered voters, compared with 41 percent for President Trump.

Other recent polls have suggested a close race in Texas, but this was the first public survey to show Mr. Biden exceeding the margin of error.

As Mr. Trump’s poll numbers sag, Mr. Biden’s campaign is seriously considering investments in states that just months ago Democrats considered out of reach — the biggest prize being Texas, with its 38 electoral votes.

The state has voted Republican in every presidential election since Jimmy Carter won it in 1976, but Democrats see an opportunity to turn that around, driven by Texas’ growing Hispanic population and increasing frustration with Mr. Trump among independent voters.

The Morning News poll also found that M.J. Hegar, the Democratic establishment’s choice to challenge Senator John Cornyn in November, was on track to win Tuesday’s primary runoff.

In addition to the presidential and Senate races, Texas presents Democrats with numerous realistic opportunities to pick up House seats this year. A strong showing in November could also help Democrats capture a majority in the Texas State House and on the State Supreme Court. Both bodies could play a crucial role in the redistricting battles that are sure to follow the 2020 census.

California rejected more than 100,000 mail-in primary ballots, many of which election officials said arrived late.

Even in California, where an already robust mail-in voting program will be expanded to the entire electorate this fall, the obstacles of conducting elections through the postal system during a pandemic are now quantifiable.

More than 100,000 ballots cast by mail for the March 3 primary elections were voided by election officials, who determined in most cases that voters had missed a deadline for sending them in, data released by the California Secretary of State’s office showed on Monday.

According to the office, 70,330 of the 102,428 rejected mail-in ballots did not arrive within a three-day grace period after the primary. The ballots had to be postmarked on or before March 3.

The accounting of rejected ballots followed Gov. Gavin Newsom’s signing of a bill last month that will require mail-in ballots to be sent to all of the nearly 21 million registered voters in the state for the November election.

The second leading cause for the ballots to be rejected was that they were unsigned or the voter’s signature did not match the name on the election rolls, according to the data, which was first reported by The Associated Press.

In Los Angeles County, the state’s most populous county, 17,743 mail-in ballots were rejected.

Nearly seven million mail-in ballots were accepted for the primary, which was headlined by the Democratic presidential nominating contest. Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont won the state, though Joseph R. Biden Jr.’s dominance in other Super Tuesday races helped him establish a lead in the delegate count.

In November, election officials must accept mail-in ballots for up to 17 days after Election Day under the bill signed by Mr. Newsom. The ballots must be postmarked by Nov. 3.

A “Where’s My Ballot?” vote-by-mail tracking tool that uses text message notifications will also be expanded statewide, Sam Mahood, a spokesman for the secretary of state’s office, wrote in an email.

Reporting was contributed by Reid J. Epstein, Katie Glueck, Patrick Healy, Astead W. Herndon, Lisa Lerer, Jeremy W. Peters, Elaina Plott, Giovanni Russonello and Neil Vigdor.