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. Trumps 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 nations politics.

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

Mr. Trump has endorsed Mr. Tuberville against his onetime ally, Mr. Sessions, whom 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.

Republican Party officials still plan to attend their convention in Florida, an epicenter of the virus.

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 partys convention next month in Florida, despite the surge in cases.

President Trump last month moved the convention from Charlotte, N.C., to Jacksonville, Floridas 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 partys delegates will conduct much of their official business, before relocating to Jacksonville for the big party so desired by Mr. Trump.

Its 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 cant 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 wont 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 citys VyStar Veterans Memorial Arena. Republican officials are also considering hosting some of the convention outdoors at the citys 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 Tuesdays 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 Russias 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. Carlsons 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.

.

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.

Id like for yall to ask Tommy Tuberville of that, Mr. Sessions told reporters. Whats he going to whos he going to support after the runoff if he loses? Where is he? Hes not available. Hes been hiding out now for two weeks.

Look, Im a strong Republican, Mr. Sessions added. We need to win this seat.

President Trump on Monday assailed a broad movement to defund police departments, invoking the kind of pro-police language that won him support with the law enforcement community in 2016 and ignoring the calls for reform that have helped shape this election.

Democrats want to defund, and they want to abolish, Mr. Trump told a panel at the White House composed of people who have had positive interactions with the police.

With Mr. Trump facing an outcry over the threats he has made to protesters calling for racial equality and police reform efforts, his remarks on Monday were part of an effort to embrace law enforcement and to move away from more explicitly racist language as polls show him lagging behind Joseph R. Biden Jr., his presumptive Democratic challenger.

That has meant targeting police reform efforts supported by Democrats, such as shifting funding from police departments to social services like mental health and substance abuse counseling. Mr. Trump has called the defunding efforts a fad, but last month, he issued an executive order outlining a series of overarching principles meant to encourage but not mandate departments to alter their behavior.

The president also painted a dark picture of the United States should Mr. Biden win.

The radical politicians are waging war on innocent Americans, Mr. Trump said. If thats what you want for a country, you probably have to vote for Sleepy Joe Biden because he doesnt know whats happening, but you are not going to have that with me.

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 presidents spokesman has said he supported the need for an urgent overhaul after several police killings of Black men and women.

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 partys 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. Guests strategic intention, the effect online was to remind many of Mr. Bidens 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.

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 whove 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 years 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.

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 courts 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 citys 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.

Could Texas really be in play for Joseph R. Biden Jr.? Its 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 states 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. Trumps poll numbers sag, Mr. Bidens 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 establishments choice to challenge Senator John Cornyn in November, was on track to win Tuesdays 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.

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 States 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 Newsoms 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 voters 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 states 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 Wheres 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 states office, wrote in an email.

The Open Society Foundations, the philanthropic group founded by the billionaire George Soros, will announce on Monday that it is investing $220 million in efforts to achieve racial equality in the United States.

The investment, a huge financial undertaking that comes during an extraordinary protest movement, will immediately reshape the landscape of Black political and civil rights organizations and support several of them for years to come.

There is this call for justice in Black and brown communities, an explosion of not just sympathy but solidarity across the board, said Patrick Gaspard, the president of Open Society. So its time to double down.

Of the $220 million, the foundation will invest $150 million in five-year grants for selected groups, including progressive and emerging organizations like the Black Voters Matter Fund and Repairers of the Breach, a group founded by the Rev. Dr. William J. Barber II of the Poor Peoples Campaign.

The money will also support more established Black political organizations like the Equal Justice Initiative, which was founded by the civil rights lawyer Bryan Stevenson and depicted in the 2019 movie Just Mercy.

The Open Society Foundations will invest an additional $70 million in local grants supporting changes to policing and criminal justice. This money will also be used for civic engagement opportunities.

Even before Mondays announcement, progressive groups, Democratic candidates and racial justice organizations had been flooded with small-dollar donations, breaking giving records and allowing Joseph R. Biden Jr. as well as House and Senate candidates to post eye-popping fund-raising numbers.

It didnt rain after all in New Hampshire, where Republicans await Trumps return.

After President Trump canceled his planned outdoor rally Saturday because his campaign said there were concerns about a looming tropical storm, the rain never came, leaving Portsmouth, N.H., with a lovely New England summer day (and reporters with no news to cover).

The schedule change technically a postponement left local Trump supporters eager for the president to appear.

The worst job in the world could be the weatherman because theyre always wrong, said Chris Ager, a Republican national committeeman from New Hampshire. There was initial disappointment that it was postponed because there was so much excitement and enthusiasm. Then with the weather, Monday morning quarterbacking is always great.

Mr. Trumps planned Portsmouth rally was to be his return to the campaign trail after he filled just one-third of an arena in Tulsa last month, a major embarrassment after his campaign manager bragged that more than one million supporters had requested tickets. The event was to take place outside and under a hangar at the Portsmouth International Airport.

Mr. Ager and Juliana Bergeron, New Hampshires other R.N.C. member, both said they believed the president would have drawn a large enough crowd to fill the airport space had the event taken place.

Im over in the southwest corner of the state and I received tons of calls for tickets, Ms. Bergeron said. If it had been a terrible storm everybody would have said he should have canceled it.

Mr. Ager said he expects the Trump campaign to reschedule the Portsmouth event within a couple of weeks.

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Some Republicans Say Florida Convention Is a Risk You Have to Take - The New York Times