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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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 it’s 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 People’s 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 Monday’s 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.

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 they’re 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. Trump’s 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 Hampshire’s 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.

“I’m 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.”

Howie Hawkins, the Syracuse activist who is a perpetual candidate for state and local office in New York and who won the Green Party’s 2020 presidential nomination, said his party owed a debt of gratitude to Jill Stein, who remains widely blamed by Democrats for siphoning votes away from Hillary Clinton in her narrow loss to President Trump.

“The Green Party moves forward, standing on the shoulders of Jill Stein, and her running mates, Cheri Honkala and Ajamu Baraka,” Mr. Hawkins said in his nomination acceptance speech Saturday. “They brought the Green Party to another level in 2012 and again in 2016.”

Ms. Stein, who was the party’s presidential nominee in both of those elections and who has declined to seek the nomination this year, argued during her campaigns that there was little difference between the major-party candidates. The Senate Intelligence Committee in 2017 said it was investigating links between Ms. Stein’s campaign and Russia’s efforts to interfere in the 2016 presidential election.

Mr. Hawkins credited Ms. Stein for the Green New Deal, which the Green Party touted for years but didn’t become a Democratic Party staple until after the 2018 midterm elections, when Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez arrived in Congress.

“Jill Stein put the Green New Deal, the signature issue of the Green Party in the 2010s, onto the national agenda,” Mr. Hawkins said. “But the Democrats have taken the slogan and watered down the content.”

Mr. Hawkins also joined many Democrats in criticizing former Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr. for conducting his campaign largely from his Delaware home because of coronavirus concerns.

“Where the hell is Joe Biden?” Mr. Hawkins said. “He lives within commuter distance of the White House press corps. He can command their attention. He should be holding news conferences and pounding away at what we need now — a test, trace, and isolate program to suppress the virus, like most other organized countries around the world.”

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