DNC Live Tracker and Updates

The Democratic National Convention will begin Monday night not only with a slate of the party’s heavyweights, which is par for the course, but also with several prominent Republicans who will help make the case for Joseph R. Biden Jr. over President Trump.

Christine Todd Whitman, a former Republican governor of New Jersey who was later appointed by President George W. Bush to run the Environmental Protection Agency, will speak. So will Meg Whitman, a major Republican fund-raiser who was the former Hewlett-Packard chief executive, who ran for governor of California in 2010, and Susan Molinari, a former Republican congresswoman from New York. Former Gov. John R. Kasich of Ohio, who sought the Republican presidential nomination in 2016, was already scheduled to speak.

“There are a bunch of people out there, silent Biden voters, Republicans that want to vote for Biden or that will be voting for Biden, and it’s important to let them know that they’re not alone, and it’s OK, that there are Republican leaders that are voting for Biden-Harris,” Representative Cedric L. Richmond, Democrat of Louisiana and a national co-chair of the Biden campaign, said at a convention press briefing held over Zoom on Monday.

They will add their names to a lineup of Democrats that includes Michelle Obama, the former first lady; Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont; Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo of New York; Gov. Gretchen Whitmer of Michigan; Representative James E. Clyburn of South Carolina, and Senator Amy Klobuchar of Minnesota.

Here is the lineup for the first night, which is scheduled to run from 9 p.m. to 11 p.m. Eastern, as announced by the Democratic National Convention Committee:

Introduction: the actress Eva Longoria.

Call to order: Representative Bennie Thompson of Mississippi.

Featured speakers: Representative Gwen Moore of Wisconsin; Mayor Muriel Bowser of Washington; Representative James Clyburn of South Carolina; Mr. Cuomo; Kristin Urquiza, who lost her father to the coronavirus; Sara Gideon, the speaker of the Maine House of Representatives; Ms. Whitmer; Christine Todd Whitman; Meg Whitman; Ms. Molinari; Mr. Kasich; Senator Doug Jones of Alabama; Senator Catherine Cortez Masto of Nevada; Ms. Klobuchar; Mr. Richmond; and Mr. Sanders.

The main event: Ms. Obama will deliver keynote remarks.

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The Political Conventions Are Starting. Here’s What to Expect.

The coronavirus pandemic has changed nearly every facet of life in 2020, and the political conventions are no exception. Our reporters catch you up on what you need to know.

“I accept —” “— your nomination —” “— for president —” “— of the United States.” [cheers and applause] The conventions. “It’s when a lot of people start taking the race seriously.” “I’ve been to pretty much every convention since 1988.” “Read my lips.” “Normally, a convention is wild.” But in 2020, things are a little different. “The pandemic has changed virtually every aspect of the 2020 campaign.” “I think it’s defining the election. And I think you’re seeing that in the way they’re approaching the conventions.” “You could say that it has caused a reckoning about, do political conventions even matter at all? Can’t we just do this whole process without them?” So, how did the conventions grow to the spectacles they are today? “What do you mean, ‘shut up’?” And what will this year hold? “Conventions have been around for about a century in various forms.” “1944: The Democratic Convention in Chicago, Illinois, lifted the roof.” “I mean, it used to be, like, you’d have these really dramatic nomination fights.” “I feel absolutely confident that, in this convention, I’m going to be the winner.” “And floor fights.” “I don’t care!” “Keep your hands off of me!” “And things about platform and who should be allowed. The networks used to give these things around-the-clock attention, gavel to gavel. And most of that stuff is gone.” Over time, the process evolved. And now candidates are chosen based on the results of primaries and caucuses, so there aren’t many surprises. “And what has happened to the conventions is they have become this sort of four-night advertisement for the candidates —” “Thank you.” “— and their parties.” “If you believe that we must be fierce and relentless and terminate terrorism, then you are a Republican.” [cheers] But generally, that format hasn’t really changed. “The critique of conventions is that they’re just kind of like a dinosaur.” [music, Los Del Rio, “Macarena”] “They’re a relic of a past age of politics.” The challenge for campaigns this year — “Good afternoon, everybody.” — is how to pack in substance and excitement virtually. “How do you do a convention in the midst of a pandemic?” “The campaigns have really struggled to carry on since the pandemic.” “Good morning.” “Joe Biden is a helpless puppet —” “In contrast to Trump’s desire to keep campaigning, Biden has been at home, for the most part.” “The Democratic Party has approached the convention and Covid —” “Hey, good evening, Tampa.” “— much more conservatively, small C, than the Republican Party.” “We saved millions of lives. And now, it’s time to open up, get back to work, OK?” So what is actually going to happen? Well, the plan has changed — a lot. “The Democrats had hoped to have a big, splashy convention in Milwaukee. Then the virus intervened.” So the Democrats went to an almost entirely virtual convention. “And we ultimately received the call that even Joe Biden would not actually be traveling to Milwaukee to give his speech in person.” Instead, now all speakers, including Biden, will deliver their addresses from around the country. And the R.N.C.? “The Republicans had hoped to hold the convention in Charlotte, North Carolina.” But after North Carolina required masks and social distancing rules, the R.N.C. moved the main events to Jacksonville. Then cases spiked in Florida. “I looked at my team, and I said, ‘The timing for this event is not right.’” So now, they’ll be mostly virtual as well. And Trump will give his speech accepting the party nomination from Washington, D.C. “The challenge for both of these conventions is, what can you do to engage the American electorate that is already very tired of sitting on Zooms all day? What can you do to ensure that they tune in anyway and get energized?” “— is Jimmy Carter and I’m running for president.” “In terms of presenting the candidate to the nation, there are two moments to watch. One’s the roll call.” “We’re now prepared to call the roll of the state.” “Roll call vote!” This is where the delegates formally nominate the candidate. “California casts 33-and- one-half votes for Kennedy.” “And it’s kind of corny, but it’s kind of cool. But it’s kind of corny.” “75 votes for President George W. Bush!” “This year, I guess, it’ll be a Zoom call. And the other is the speech.” “Extremism in the defense of liberty —” “Let us build a peace.” “Let me be the bridge to an America that only the unknowing call myth.” “This is the biggest audience they will have for their pitch to Americans.” “The crime and violence that today afflicts our nation —” “This is their chance to lay out their vision for the future of the country.” “— I alone can fix it.” This year, Biden and Trump will give these speeches to, well, primarily a TV camera. “Giving a speech without an audience and without having a constant loop of audience feedback does look poised to present a challenge for both of the presidential contenders.” So are there any potential benefits to this? “One of the sort of benefits of the pandemic is that people in, well, a lot of the country are still locked at home. The question is, Are you going to watch reruns of ‘The Sopranos,’ or are you going to watch the convention?” “I think there’s a lot of fear and a lot of interest. And people really want to know how these different leaders are going to lead us through this pandemic and through the economic crisis that accompanied it.” But there’s also potentially a whole lot of downside. “You lose the energy that, presumably, you send delegates out into the world with to begin the fall campaign.” “For the president, what he’s missing out on is showing off this contrast from four years ago, when there was a lot of dissent against him.” “Stand and speak and vote your conscience.” “He would be able to show that, four years later, the party is in lockstep with him.” “They don’t call it Super Tuesday for nothing!” “Joe Biden is missing these big moments that would show someone who has struggled to look like a real candidate with a lot of enthusiasm behind him.” “Just this morning we heard we won Maine as well.” “Yeah, right!” So is it time to rethink conventions altogether? “I think the conventions matter less this year than ever — partly because neither one of them is happening in a normal way, but also because this election seems more than anything to be a referendum about Donald Trump. It’s really Donald Trump against Donald Trump.” “You’re fired! Get out!” “We’re just getting started.” And don’t expect the rest of the campaign to resume any sort of normalcy soon. “Historically, the conventions do mark the beginning of a really intense general election campaign cycle. But the subsequent activities after the convention — door-to-door engaging of those voters, how those voters actually cast their ballots — all of that is set to look extraordinarily different this year.” “So, we are in my tiny, postage stamp-sized backyard in Washington.” “We’re in my backyard in Hollywood, California.” “And I am currently at home in New York City, about to head to Delaware.” “It’s very hot. It’s very buggy. But we’re making the best of it.” “Hi. I’m Sarah Kerr, the producer of this video. We spent weeks looking back through footage of old conventions and learning how they might be different this year. Now, they’re finally here. And they’re definitely going to be unconventional. Check out nytimes.com every night for live video and analysis. We’ll see you there.”

Greetings from the Democratic convention in Milwaukee!

Oh, wait, not really. Like the candidates, delegates, contributors and hangers-on, most of the New York Times team covering the convention this week — and the Republican convention next week — is everywhere but Milwaukee. But we are looking to see how the party, and the nation, adjust to this latest challenge of running a presidential campaign during a pandemic.

Here are a few things I’ll be watching for:

• Can Joseph R. Biden Jr., the presumptive Democratic nominee, adjust to speaking to a room that does not have a crowd? If he does, and the signs in his limited appearances so far are promising for him, that could give him a decided advantage over President Trump, who has struggled to modulate his tone as he faces a campaign without rallies.

• Will the Democratic Party in the post-Biden era — no, it’s not too soon to think about this — be the party of Kamala Harris, the California senator and presumptive vice-presidential nominee? From Andrew M. Cuomo in the East to Gretchen Whitmer in the middle of the country to Gavin Newsom in the West, there will be a lot of Democrats trying to use this time to stake a claim on the party’s future. That’s going to be much more difficult in a format in which most speeches are limited to less than five minutes.

• How will Ms. Harris define her role as a vice-presidential candidate? Will she speak mostly about Mr. Biden, Mr. Trump or Ms. Harris? This will probably be the biggest platform she will have, short of the vice-presidential debate, until Election Day.

• Balloons and boos. Many longtime convention goers are going to miss the dramatic balloon drop at the end of the fourth night. (Even better, truth be told, is when they flub the balloon drop.) But it’s a good guess that the convention organizers are not going to miss another convention staple: the inevitable boos from Democratic dissidents.

Enjoy. We will keep updating this campaign briefing until the final balloon — sorry, until the final gavel drops. Or at least until our Zoom time expires.

President Trump lashed out at Joseph R. Biden Jr. and Senator Kamala Harris on Monday morning as Democrats opened their four-day national political convention, questioning Mr. Biden’s mental capabilities.

“Biden is shot, I’m telling you, he’s shot — there’s something going on,” the president said during a telephone interview on “Fox & Friends.” “Now, with that being said, I don’t underestimate anybody. Only a fool would do that.”

With most polls showing the president trailing Mr. Biden nationally and in key swing states, Mr. Trump and his campaign have repeatedly insinuated that Mr. Biden, the former vice president and his Democratic rival for the presidency, is mentally slow.

During the interview, Mr. Trump cited a CNN poll released on Sunday showing him trailing Mr. Biden by only four points — within the poll’s margin of error and a smaller deficit than several other new and recent surveys found. He said he believed that the new poll reflected what he said was “tremendous enthusiasm” for his campaign that could be seen in gatherings of his supporters across the country.

“The boats, thousands and thousands of boats” gathering to support his campaign, he said, “and the bikers riding up, thousands along the highways, ‘bikers for Trump.’”

Mr. Trump called Ms. Harris, Mr. Biden’s running mate, “a disaster,” misstating her positions by saying that “she wants to take away everyone’s gun. She wants to totally ban fossil fuels.”

The president shrugged off a question about whether he was preparing for the coming debates against Mr. Biden, saying that he did not prepare much for the debates he participated in during the 2016 presidential campaign.

“Honestly, what I’m doing is I’m doing my job,” he said, adding: “I mean, that’s the best debate prep. I’ve sort of been preparing all my life. That’s what I do. But I guess I’ll do some preparation, but I didn’t do much last time.”

The interview was the beginning of what the White House promises will be a nonstop assault on the Democratic ticket by the president this week. He is scheduled to deliver two speeches on Monday afternoon — the first in Minnesota and the second in Wisconsin, where the Democratic convention was originally scheduled to take place before the pandemic.

On Tuesday, the president will give a speech on border security in Yuma, Ariz. On Thursday, the day Mr. Biden is scheduled to formally accept his party’s nomination, Mr. Trump plans to deliver remarks in Old Forge, Pa., not far from Mr. Biden’s hometown, Scranton.

A political convention is traditionally the work of thousands — event planners, camera operators, stage managers, even an inflation team for the ceremonial balloon drop on the nominee.

But with the coronavirus sequestering delegates to living rooms and reducing the raucous arena to a pixelated party of (very roughly) like-minded politicos, the most critical staff members for this year’s nearly all-virtual convention are the ones who often operate behind the scenes, away from the stage, in front of small screens:

The digital team.

For the Democratic National Convention, their work has meant building a network capable of expanding from a dozen or so remote feeds to hundreds; ensuring a livestream has enough redundancy to offset any lags or other problems and constructing a broadcast to recreate some semblance of a reactive audience.

It’s also involved organizing a coaching team for speakers and participants to mitigate, as much as possible, any embarrassing Zoom-mutes or microphone mishaps.

This was supposed to be a banner moment for Democrats in Wisconsin, a chance to put out the welcome mat for thousands of delegates and gush about “America’s Dairyland.”

But party stalwarts in the state, which could be a linchpin in the November election, were relegated to the role of virtual hosts on Monday as the Democratic National Convention got underway.

The head of the Wisconsin Democrats said that if it wasn’t for President Trump’s failure in handling the coronavirus pandemic, delegates would have been able to gather in Milwaukee for an in-person convention.

The party chairman, Ben Wikler, criticized the Trump administration’s response to the health crisis during a welcome breakfast held online on the convention’s opening day.

Milwaukee’s mayor, Tom Barrett, commiserated with the other party leaders about losing out on an in-person convention.

“We have been dealt a rough set of cards,” Mr. Barrett said.

Gov. Tony Evers, who has clashed with conservatives over emergency orders during the pandemic, said that Republicans had put power and politics ahead of public health.

“The pandemic has laid bare the hard truths around our country,” Mr. Evers said. “Joe Biden understands what it takes to lead a country in crisis.”

Senator Tammy Baldwin said that Mr. Trump, his son Eric Trump, and Vice President Mike Pence were putting the public at risk by planning upcoming campaign events in Wisconsin.

“They’re unsafe because they’re holding in-person events,” Ms. Baldwin said. “The mismanagement and total utter failure of leadership during the pandemic is laid out starkly.”

The Democratic National Convention will air from 9 p.m. to 11 p.m. Eastern time every day, Monday through Thursday.

There are several ways to watch:

• The official livestream will be here. It will also be available on YouTube, Facebook, Twitter and Twitch.

• ABC, CBS, NBC and Fox News will carry the convention from 10 p.m. to 11 p.m. each night. C-SPAN, CNN, MSNBC and PBS will cover the full two hours each night.

• Streams will be available on Apple TV, Roku and Amazon Fire TV by searching “Democratic National Convention” or “2020 DNC,” and on Amazon Prime Video by searching “DNC.”

• The convention will air on AT&T U-verse (channels 212 and 1212) and AT&T DirectTV (channel 201). It will also air on Comcast Xfinity Flex and Comcast X1 (say “DNC” into your voice remote).

• You can watch on a PlayStation 4 or PSVR through the Littlstar app.

• If you have an Alexa device, you can say “Alexa, play the Democratic National Convention.”

It wouldn’t be the Democratic National Convention without some Hollywood star power, and this year is no exception, even though the proceedings will be largely virtual.

The actresses Eva Longoria, Tracee Ellis Ross, Kerry Washington and Julia Louis-Dreyfus will serve as M.C.s during the four nights of the convention, organizers announced on Monday.

“The voices we’re including are the perfect messengers to lift up our theme of unity and help us engage with more Americans than ever before,” Stephanie Cutter, the convention’s program director, said in a statement.

It was not immediately clear whether the M.C.s would make live or prerecorded appearances, or how much speaking time they would have. The organizers said only that the hosts would “keep the program moving and connected.”

Ms. Longoria, 45, a Mexican-American TV star known for her role on “Desperate Housewives,” will be the convention’s Monday night M.C. She has sought to increase Latino representation in government and was a founder of the group Latino Victory Project and spoke at the 2016 Democratic convention, where she criticized Donald J. Trump’s comments about Central American immigrants.

“My father isn’t a criminal or a rapist,” she said then. “In fact, he’s a veteran.”

Ms. Ross, 47, who has won a Golden Globe Award for her role on “black-ish” and moderated a book tour for the former first lady Michelle Obama in 2018, will be the M.C. on Tuesday.

Ms. Washington, 43, who starred on the ABC television series “Scandal,” will handle hosting duties on Wednesday night.

This convention will culminate with Ms. Louis-Dreyfus taking over the M.C. role on Thursday, the night of Mr. Biden’s nomination acceptance speech.

Ms. Louis-Dreyfus, 59, was Elaine on “Seinfeld” and played the fictional vice president Selina Meyer on the HBO series “Veep.”

In 2017, when Ms. Louis-Dreyfus disclosed that she had breast cancer, Mr. Biden tweeted his support for her, writing, “We Veeps stick together. Jill and I, and all of the Bidens, are with you, Julia.”

In the months since Senator Bernie Sanders ended his campaign for president, progressive candidates have notched once-improbable primary victories against longtime Democratic incumbents. Each member of the so-called Squad, the group of progressive women of color in the House, will almost certainly return to Washington. The coronavirus pandemic has revitalized support nationwide for progressive policy proposals including “Medicare for all.”

In that time, Mr. Sanders has quietly faded back into Senate life. Aside from endorsing some fellow progressives down the ballot, he has largely kept his focus on the public health crisis. One of his latest initiatives was to introduce legislation that would provide “masks for all.”

On Monday, Mr. Sanders will address the Democratic National Convention and once again make his case for the progressive cause. Once again, he will deliver a speech as a losing candidate to rally his loyal followers behind another nominee.

But this is not 2016. While Mr. Sanders nominally lent his support to Hillary Clinton at this point four years ago, he never stopped arguing that he had been mistreated in the primary — that the election was rigged and the entire political system was, too — an air of grievance that his followers took with them to the convention floor.

That 2016 gathering was overshadowed by hacked emails from D.N.C. accounts showing party officials eager to help Mrs. Clinton and undercut Mr. Sanders — a revelation that left the party’s Clinton and Sanders wings deeply divided and confirmed the longstanding complaints of bias from the Vermont senator.

Mr. Sanders is still stubborn, still passionate and still convinced he would have made the best president. But this year, he also appears to be something else: at peace.

Gov. Wanda Vázquez of Puerto Rico conceded defeat on Sunday night to Pedro R. Pierluisi, a former congressional representative who briefly served as the island’s governor last year.

The results came a week after the primary was delayed because elections officials failed to deliver ballots to a majority of precincts. Puerto Rico’s Supreme Court ruled that another day of voting had to take place and that the ballots cast earlier should be counted.

Ms. Vázquez is a Republican and Mr. Pierluisi a Democrat, but both belong to the New Progressive Party, which supports statehood for Puerto Rico. Mr. Pierluisi will face Mayor Charlie Delgado of Isabela, a town on the island’s northwestern coast, in the November general election.

When it comes to mainland politics, Mr. Delgado is not registered as a Democrat or a Republican. Mr. Delgado won the nomination for the Popular Democratic Party, which supports Puerto Rico’s status as a U.S. commonwealth, after defeating Senator Eduardo Bhatia and Mayor Carmen Yulín Cruz of San Juan. Ms. Cruz became well known outside of Puerto Rico after she blasted President Trump for his administration’s botched response to Hurricane Maria in 2017.

The Trump administration had made overtures to Ms. Vázquez in recent months to try to show a federal commitment to storm recovery.

Ms. Vázquez became governor a year ago after former Gov. Ricardo A. Rosselló resigned after huge protests. Mr. Rosselló chose Mr. Pierluisi as his successor, but the Supreme Court ruled the appointment was improper.

MILWAUKEE — In a year of canceled plans, with vacations, graduations and sports seasons upended by the coronavirus crisis, the stretch of downtown Milwaukee where Democrats were supposed to hold their nominating convention this week was quiet and sparsely populated — another reminder of a summer lost.

Instead of thousands of Democrats preparing to gather at the newly built Fiserv Forum, there was just one street blocked off this weekend near the smaller Wisconsin Center, which will host the last few parts of the Democratic National Convention that will still take place in this city. Hotels were closed, restaurants were empty and the bars of America’s most beer-loving city were eerily barren.

“What convention?” said Michaela Jaggi, a 21-year-old who passed by the Wisconsin Center on Saturday afternoon.

She eventually remembered: Mr. Biden was supposed to accept the Democratic nomination for president here this week. And the Democratic Party, shamed for not adequately investing in Wisconsin during the 2016 election, was to showcase its commitment to an all-important Electoral College state.

That was before the virus crisis forced Democrats to transform their convention into a virtual event, in which none of the leading participants will actually appear from Milwaukee.

“I’ve spent all these months in my apartment,” Ms. Jaggi said. “I guess it was cool they were coming here, but it’s responsible they’re not anymore.”

President Trump is struggling to attract and retain a reliable stable of millionaires and billionaires willing to write seven-figure checks, despite his takeover of the Republican Party and a policy agenda that largely serves the interests of America’s ultrawealthy. Thus far, only six of the top 38 donors to Trump-related super PACs in 2016 and 2018 have contributed to America First for the president’s re-election, according to a New York Times analysis of federal campaign finance data.

Mr. Trump is hardly lacking for cash; he has received huge numbers of small donations online from a fervent grass-roots base, and he raised a jaw-dropping $165 million in July for his campaign and the two fund-raising committees that he shares with the Republican National Committee. The Trump Victory fund, one of those committees, has also collected respectable sums through donations that cannot exceed $580,600 — as opposed to super PACs, which are vessels for unlimited contributions.

But the president’s sagging popularity, driven by his erratic and divisive behavior during the coronavirus crisis, has prompted some of the wealthiest Republicans — the heavy artillery of modern politics — to delay, divert or diminish their giving, just as Joseph R. Biden Jr. has begun to tap a rich vein of Wall Street and Silicon Valley support, party operatives and donors said in interviews.