Biden vs. Trump: Live Updates for the 2020 Election – The New York Times

While recent polls have shown growing support among Republicans and Democrats for instituting police reform efforts — including banning chokeholds — after George Floyd, a Black man in Minneapolis, was killed in police custody, most Americans reject the idea of defunding police departments.

Mr. Trump and his campaign have tried to accuse Mr. Biden of supporting efforts to defund the police, but Mr. Biden has actually opposed them. The former vice president’s spokesman has said he supported the need for an “urgent” overhaul after several police killings of Black men and women.

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 could not 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 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 leading outside 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.