Last week’s Republican National Convention was focused almost entirely on a different presidential contest than the one we see today. Speakers railed against President Biden, Donald Trump’s presumed opponent in November — but whose withdrawal Sunday rendered much of the criticism irrelevant.

One comment made in a speech by the former president’s son Donald Trump Jr., though, targeted the Democratic Party more broadly.

“There was a time when the Democrats really wanted what was best for America, even if they had a different way of getting there,” he said. “It was the party of Franklin Roosevelt, John F. Kennedy, Martin Luther King Jr. You may have disagreed with that party, but at least you could respect it.” He excoriated today’s “extreme Democrat Party” — a term that itself is part of a long-standing effort to indicate disrespect to the left.

That comment, though, made me wonder how views of the two major parties and views of their candidates have overlapped over time. Is it the case that, whether the party has changed, views of the parties and their candidates have? (It also made me wonder when Republicans like Trump Jr. became willing to cede MLK to their opponents, but that’s neither here nor there.)

To answer that question, I turned to data from the American National Election Studies (ANES). The ANES is a poll conducted around every presidential election and includes questions asking Americans to rate the political parties and their candidates on a scale from 0 to 100. The pollsters refer to this as a “thermometer,” with 0 indicating very cold opinions and 100 very warm.

As you might expect, views of the parties correlate to views of the parties’ candidates: If you like the Democratic Party, you tend to like the Democratic presidential candidates. If you don’t, you don’t.

What’s interesting in the data, though, is that only in recent years have views of the opposition party become more correlated to views of a party’s candidate.

Look at the box in the top left corner of the chart below. It shows views of the Republican Party from cold to warm (left to right) and views of the Democratic presidential candidate in 1980 from cold to warm (top to bottom).

Those with the coldest views of the GOP had warm views of the Democratic candidate. But otherwise, it’s a muddle.

Scroll down to the 2020 box at the bottom of that column, and you see that those with strong positive views of the GOP now have strong negative views of the Democrat in the race. The same holds for the third column: views of the Democratic Party vs. views of the Republican presidential candidate.

(The winning candidate in each election is outlined in black.)

In fact, 40 years ago, it was common for those viewing the Democratic or Republican party very warmly to also view the opposing party’s presidential candidate very warmly. In 1980, about a quarter of those who viewed either candidate very warmly also viewed the other party’s candidate very warmly.

In 2020, almost none did.

We can visualize that another way. Particularly since 2004, views of the opposing party’s candidate have plunged among those with strong positive feelings about a party.

This is in part because the number of people with positive views of the parties has also dropped. In 1980, only 6 percent of respondents rated the Democratic Party at or below a 24 on the 0-to-100 scale. Only 7 percent said the same of the Republican Party.

By 1996, that rose to 9 percent for the Democrats and 11 percent for the Republicans. By 2012, it was 19 percent and 25 percent respectively. In 2020, about a third of respondents rated each party that poorly.

It’s safe to assume, then, that part of the reason that partisan hostility to the opposing party’s candidate has increased among those with strong positive views of a party is that those with strong positive views of a party have eroded down to the most fervent partisans.

That’s who Trump Jr. was speaking to, of course: a Republican convention that had itself been winnowed down to its most pro-Trump element. In that room, it’s very safe to say, feelings about the Democratic Party’s nominee would run very cold indeed — whoever that nominee turns out to be.

Dee Dawkins-Haigler had just left church in Lithonia, Ga., on Sunday and was sitting down to lunch when her phone suddenly erupted with a rapid fire of text messages, one after the other, so many she could barely keep up.

They were messages from other Democratic National Convention delegates, mostly fellow Black women, reacting to the news: President Biden was ending his 2024 campaign and had endorsed Vice President Harris to replace him.

She was in disbelief. Confused. Let down. Regretful. “Totally blindsided.” Angry at fellow Democrats for, as she sees it, bullying Biden out of the race. And already feeling tremendous pressure about her upcoming role.

Dawkins-Haigler is one of almost 4,000 DNC delegates who were chosen to represent the more than 14 million Democratic primary voters who cast ballots supporting Biden as the nominee. But with him stepping aside, those delegates are now free to vote for whomever they want — which Dawkins-Haigler said puts them in “a terrible position.” She plans to follow Biden’s wishes and signed a petition supporting Harris as the nominee. But she worries that the first Black woman candidate for president will face insurmountable racism and sexism, then be blamed by the same party leaders who pushed Biden out of the race.

And in a year when Democrats have made protecting democracy a cornerstone of their attack against former president Donald Trump, Dawkins-Haigler worries that the process of replacing Biden after voters chose him would not only divide Democrats but raise legal and ethical questions that could prompt chaos in the final months of the presidential campaign.

“I’ve never seen this type of confusion in the ninth inning, because that’s where we are. We are in the bottom of the ninth, and for us to switch out … it’s scary to me,” said Dawkins-Haigler, 54, a former Georgia state representative and an ordained minister who lives in Stonecrest, Ga. “Biden was duly elected by the American people to be the Democratic nominee. Now we are going to go in now and scuttle all of that and try to coalesce around one person … We just don’t have time for this.”

Delegates to party conventions have long played a mostly ceremonial role in the process of selecting a presidential nominee, but now Democrats are embarking on something historic and unprecedented — replacing the top of the ticket with a little more than 100 days until the election. Party leaders have made clear they would like to avoid the chaos of several candidates vying for the nomination at the convention. But because Harris was not chosen by voters in this year’s primaries and caucuses, her elevation could open her up to accusations that she did not earn the nomination through a democratic process.

Although the process of replacing a nominee is allowed under party rules, some Democrats worry that the appearance of being undemocratic threatens to undermine the party’s principles.

“There has not really been a historical precedent for this, and I think a fair and open process is critical both for the tens of millions of Democratic voters who turned out, but also for the perception of voters everywhere,” said Ryan Morgan, a delegate from Virginia who doesn’t want to immediately anoint Harris. “We have a primary process, we have a democratic process, and having [delegates] picking someone off the outgoing president’s opinion is not what people are used to.”

Already, Trump and other Republicans have called this effort to replace Biden undemocratic, and a conservative think tank has threatened to challenge a new nominee in the courts — an effort that election lawyers say will undoubtedly fail but could help cement in voters’ minds that the new nominee was not directly chosen by voters.

Throughout the campaign, Democrats have assailed Trump as a threat to democracy because he has denied the results of the 2020 election and refused to concede. But now, Trump is trying to use the potential elevation of Harris to flip the script.

“The Democrats pick a candidate, Crooked Joe Biden, he loses the Debate badly, then panics, and makes mistake after mistake, is told he can’t win, and decide they will pick another candidate, probably Harris. They stole the race from Biden after he won it in the primaries — A First! These people are the real THREAT TO DEMOCRACY!” Trump posted Monday on his social media platform Truth Social.

And Trump’s running mate, Sen. J.D. Vance (R-Ohio), told supporters at a rally that Democratic elites “got in a smoke filled-room and decided to throw Joe Biden overboard.”

“That is not how it works. That is a threat to democracy, not the Republican Party, which is fighting for democracy every single day,” Vance said.

Before Biden dropped out, he repeatedly noted that voters had selected him, not anyone else, as the nominee.

“I’m the nominee of this party because 14 million Democrats like you voted for me in the primaries,” Biden said at a Detroit campaign event on July 12. “You made me the nominee, no one else. Not the press, not the pundits, not the insiders, not donors, you the voters. You decided, no one else, and I’m not going anywhere.”

It’s unclear whether the delegates will select Biden’s replacement in a virtual roll call in early August or wait until their convention in Chicago that begins Aug. 19. Before Biden left the race, Democrats planned to certify his nomination before the convention, citing concerns about ballot access deadlines. DNC leaders will decide Wednesday whether to go ahead with the early vote and when that would happen. Senior Democrats have said they’d like to have the nomination wrapped up for Harris before the convention. To that end, party leaders are scrambling behind the scenes to shore up support for her.

Harris spent more than 10 hours calling more than 100 party leaders on Sunday, telling them she plans to earn the nomination in her own right, according to a person familiar with the vice president’s actions who discussed the private calls on the condition of anonymity. That night, all 50 state Democratic Party chairs affirmed their support for Harris.

More than 1,000 delegates have pledged to back Harris, according to a survey by the Associated Press, signaling that she could soon lock up the committed support of the 1,976 delegates needed to become the nominee. Several state parties — including those in Florida, North Carolina, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania — have announced that all or almost all of their delegates support Harris.

Many delegates have argued that picking Harris is the most democratic option because she was on the 2024 ticket that primary voters chose, which meant they already supported her as next in line for the presidency.

Roberto Reveles, 91, a delegate from Arizona, said it is “perfectly fair” to swap Harris in for Biden.

“I will, in good conscience, be able to vote for the person that the president himself delegated as his successor, in case of an emergency,” Reveles said.

Tennessee delegate Megan Lange, 33, added: “It makes sense that our vote for Harris as VP would pivot to a vote for Kamala Harris as president.”

No matter who the Democrats chose as their nominee, there is nothing undemocratic about the process of replacing Biden on the ticket, said Rick Hasen, an election law expert and professor at the University of California at Los Angeles.

“The situation we have here — the winner of the primary process — decided that he cannot serve. This is the party’s democratic process for handling such a situation,” he said. “It would be the same thing as if a candidate died … there’s nothing remotely undemocratic about it.”

But Republicans are eager to sow doubt about that.

Mike Howell, executive director of the Heritage Foundation’s Oversight Project, wrote in an early April memo that if Democrats tried to replace Biden, “there is the potential for pre-election litigation in some states that would make the process difficult and perhaps unsuccessful.”

After Biden’s announcement, Howell said the conservative think tank was “deep in the litigation planning stages” and pointed to an Oversight Project post on X: “We have been preparing for this moment for months. Many in the media tried discrediting us. Who is laughing now? No more ‘make it up as you go’ elections Stay tuned …”

Election law experts say conservatives don’t have a case because Biden was not yet the official nominee when he dropped out and the process allows for delegates to select a nominee.

“We have a representational democracy,” said Trevor Potter, president of the Campaign Legal Center and a Republican former chairman of the Federal Election Commission. “These delegates were elected by 14 million voters … Those delegates are still there, they’re still entitled to select a nominee, and now it’s going to be someone else.”

That nominee, Potter added, would have the same right to appear on ballots around the nation as Biden would have had.

“I think it’s ridiculous for them to say the election is being stolen, as candidates are able to make their own decisions about whether or not they want to remain on the ballot,” said Karthik Soora, a delegate from Texas.

While Dawkins-Haigler is nervous about the path ahead, she said she is also hopeful the party will now unite to take on Trump — and soon.

“One thing I can say is, we are full of resolve. We are a strong party. We can bounce back from a lot of things,” she said. “We’re always put in the position of having to save democracy. And we’ll do it again.”

Bailey reported from Atlanta, and Wingett Sanchez reported from Phoenix. Erin Cox, Alice Crites, Molly Hennessy-Fiske, Meryl Kornfield, Patrick Marley, Nicole Markus, Ence Morse, Tyler Pager, Sabrina Rodriguez, Aaron Schaffer, Michael Scherer, Gregory Schneider and Laura Vozzella contributed to this report.

After weeks of intense focus on President Biden’s health and age that ended with his withdrawal from the campaign on Sunday, the script has flipped: Former president Donald Trump is now the oldest presidential candidate in history — and one who has been less transparent about his medical condition than his former opponent.

Trump, a 78-year-old with a history of heart disease and obesity, according to experts, has not shared any updated bloodwork results or other specific information during this campaign to help experts assess his ongoing medical risks.

Instead, he has released a vague, three-paragraph letter from his primary care physician, Bruce A. Aronwald, who wrote in November that the former president was in excellent physical and mental health, and who later said in a statement released by campaign officials to The Washington Post that “there is no need for President Trump to release another medical report in addition to the one he recently made public.”

Seven days after the attempted assassination against him on July 13, Trump released a letter from his former White House physician, Rep. Ronny Jackson (R-Tex.), who described treating a two-centimeter-wide wound to Trump’s right ear and said he had a CT scan of his head and other tests but did not release the results. Jackson said in the letter that Trump was initially treated by the medical staff at Butler Memorial Hospital in Butler, Pa., and that he saw the former president later that night at Trump’s golf course in Bedminster, N.J. Jackson, who is one of Trump’s most loyal supporters, did not respond to a request for comment. A hospital spokesman could not be immediately reached for comment.

Jackson has previously said that Trump aced a cognitive test when he was president, but those results also have not been released.

Now, instead of facing an 81-year-old candidate whose mental and physical health were questioned after a disastrous debate in June, Trump’s opponent is most likely to be Vice President Harris, a 59-year-old with no publicly disclosed health issues. Harris has not released a detailed medical report as vice president. The White House and her campaign did not immediately respond to questions from The Post about whether she would do so as a presidential candidate.

The age of presidential candidates has been a key issue for voters this year. A Washington Post-ABC News-Ipsos poll, conducted before last week’s Republican convention, found that 60 percent of Americans said Trump is too old for another term as president, including 82 percent of Democrats, 65 percent of independents and 29 percent of Republicans. Before Biden dropped out of the race, many Democrats bristled at what they argued was an unfair critical focus on his age compared to Trump.

A Trump campaign spokesman did not respond to a request for comment.

There is no requirement for presidential candidates to release medical records, and they would have to agree to waive privacy laws to enable a physician to do so. But medical experts said that given Trump’s age and the previous emphasis on health in the race, voters would benefit if everyone in the race were transparent with their doctors’ findings.

“It would take away the fear that someone has an issue that is not being disclosed because they know if might affect their candidacy,” Ira Monka, president of the American Osteopathic Association, said in an interview before Biden’s withdrawal, referring to both him and Trump. “This is the highest office in the world so we want to have complete openness as much as possible. If the candidates would agree on that, I think the public would be very happy.”

Trump has a mixed history of releasing medical information. In 2015, during his first run for the White House, he said he instructed his doctor, Harold Bornstein, to release “a full medical report” and promised “it will show perfection.” Bornstein did not release Trump’s records, but instead issued a four-paragraph letter that said Trump would be “the healthiest individual ever elected to the presidency.” Bornstein, who died in 2021, later told CNN that Trump “dictated that whole letter.”

In September 2016, Trump released another letter from Bornstein that included more information and concluded that Trump was “in excellent physical health.”

One of the most detailed releases about Trump’s health came during his presidency in 2018, when Jackson appeared at the White House press room podium and provided details that included a CT scan showing Trump’s coronary calcium score was 133, up from 34 in 2009. At the time, CNN’s chief medical correspondent, Sanjay Gupta, and other experts said the score indicated that Trump had heart disease.

The letter also said Trump weighed 239 pounds, making him borderline obese. The following two years, Trump’s doctors revealed that his weight had increased to 243 and then 244 pounds, making him obese under government standards.

But no such details have been released since Trump left the White House. After losing his reelection bid, Trump has relied on Aronwald, a doctor of osteopathic medicine who is a member of Trump’s Bedminster golf course and runs a private “concierge” practice that caters to high-income patients. Aronwald declined to speak to a Post reporter who in April visited his office in Morristown, N.J. He has never spoken publicly about Trump’s condition.

The letter Aronwald released on Nov. 20 did not include specific results such as blood pressure or weight. Nor did it disclose Trump’s medications. Instead, it was filled with superlatives, saying Trump was in “excellent health” and had “exceptional” cognitive ability. It said without providing any numbers that Trump had “reduced his weight.” It said his cardiovascular studies were normal.

Trump has said he twice “aced” cognitive tests, but he has not released them and has not said if he has taken one since 2018. Ziad Nasreddine, the neurologist who created the test, told The Post earlier this year that a six-year-old test would be too outdated to be relevant. He said that a candidate who is Trump’s age should take regular cognitive tests and publicly release the results.

Some experts previously told The Post that Trump could face an elevated genetic risk of dementia. Trump has said that his father was “addled with Alzheimer’s,” which specialists said could increase Trump’s chances of inheriting the gene that can cause the disease. When Trump turned 50, he told Playboy magazine that watching his father face cognitive problems had a profound effect on him.

“Turning 50 does make you think about mortality, or immortality, or whatever,” Trump said.

Scott Clement contributed to this report.

About 24 hours after President Biden’s historic announcement that he’s ending his 2024 campaign, Democrats appear to be largely united behind replacing him with Vice President Harris.

Virtually every major would-be rival for the nomination is now backing her, as are more than 70 percent of congressional Democrats. Some state Democratic parties are already moving to commit their delegates to her.

It’s been a remarkable closing of ranks — especially when you consider there is scant hard evidence that Democrats are much better off with Harris than with Biden.

A Washington Post review of polls conducted after Biden’s stumbling June 27 debate performance shows Harris trailing Donald Trump by 1.5 points, while Biden trailed by 1.9 points. Harris performs similarly to Biden in the few swing-state polls that have tested her, and disapproval of her outpaces approval by double digits in most polls.

You could be forgiven for thinking that Democrats are just ready to be done with all this — that they’re bowing to the reality that bypassing Harris would be too difficult, and that they’re being somewhat Pollyannaish about a flawed candidate’s prospects.

But there’s certainly a possibility that Harris taking the reins and reintroducing herself could recast the race. Virtually every poll we have on this has been in the realm of the hypothetical, and now it’s reality.

Here’s what we can say about where things stand, and where they go from here.

Her image is poor but has more upside

The first thing to note is that vice presidents’ images are often tied to the presidents they serve. When the president declines, they decline too. It’s likely that many voters haven’t truly consumed much information about Harris; now they will.

She certainly starts at a familiar, if somewhat less stark image deficit. Her disapproval rating is about 12 points higher than her approval rating in the FiveThirtyEight average, while Biden is more than 17 points underwater.

But significantly, fewer voters are dug in against her. While Biden’s average disapproval is 56 percent, hers is about 50 percent. Generally, fewer than 4 in 10 voters have strongly negative feelings about her.

That suggests she could have a higher ceiling in this race, if she takes advantage of it.

If she can’t improve that 12-point image deficit, though, it will be a problem. While Americans view Trump unfavorably by 12 points, that’s more a measure of the person than the job performance. And retrospective approval of Trump’s presidency is often slightly better than his personal image.

There’s an opening for a more standard-issue Democrat

Perhaps the most optimistic data points for Harris involve the way other Democrats (not named Biden) have been performing.

While Harris and Biden have trailed nationally by between one and two points, Democrats currently hold a small lead on the generic ballot — meaning when voters are asked to choose between an unspecified Democrat and an unspecified Republican for Congress.

Also key on this front: In the vast majority of Senate races, the Democratic candidates have performed better than Biden — and often significantly better:

• A Washington Post review of recent Senate polling shows the Democratic candidate beating Biden’s margins in 17 of 20 Senate races. The only exceptions were in uncompetitive races in Maryland, North Dakota and West Virginia.
• The average Democrat performed more than five points better than Biden, on the margins. And in 8 of the 20 races, the Democrat’s margin has been as much as double digits better than Biden’s.

Some of these are Democratic incumbents who tend to have stronger brands. And often, it’s about Republicans taking less of the vote than Trump. But Democrats have also done better than Biden in many open-seat races and even in races with GOP incumbents (as in Florida, Missouri, Tennessee and Texas).

These data could certainly be read to suggest that a candidate who can successfully pitch themselves as a more standard-issue, acceptable Democrat — without Biden’s age and mental acuity concerns — could be better positioned.

“I don’t think Joe Biden has a ton of advantages,” top Trump campaign adviser Susie Wiles told the Atlantic’s Tim Alberta back in March, as Alberta reported this week. “But I do think Democrats do.”

A big question is whether she can pull back young and diverse groups

Democrats’ big problems with Biden on the ticket haven’t just been his age; more specifically, they’ve been his apparent erosion in support with key Democratic-leaning groups — especially young, Black and Hispanic voters. His numbers with those groups have been worse than those for virtually every recent Democratic presidential nominee.

There is some evidence Harris could help on that front.

A Washington Post/ABC News/Ipsos poll earlier this month showed her running four points higher than Biden with Black voters and Hispanic voters, and five points higher with voters under 40.

That’s only a modest improvement on Biden, and the 14 percent of Black voters and 42 percent of Hispanic voters she was ceding to Trump would still be some of the highest GOP numbers in decades. But the data suggests she could make inroads in ways Biden hasn’t been.

In addition, 22 percent of Black voters who didn’t back Harris against Trump said they would consider her, as did 12 percent of Hispanic voters. She also showed more upside with young voters; in addition to her higher level of support, 14 percent of those who didn’t back her said they would consider her — compared to 10 percent for Biden.

Combine those numbers with the voters already supporting Harris over Trump, and nearly 9 in 10 Black voters said they would at least consider voting for Harris, as did about 6 in 10 Hispanic voters and voters under 40 years old. Those numbers are higher than Biden’s in each case, indicating Harris has a higher ceiling.

So the opportunity is there for her to improve Democrats’ standing. The main question is whether Harris is capable of seizing on it.

As you might have heard if you have been on social media in the past 24 hours or so, the upcoming presidential election is slated to be the first in 48 years in which the Democratic and Republican tickets will not feature a member of the Bush, Clinton or Biden families.

And that is true. From 1980 through 1992, the Republican ticket featured George H.W. Bush, first as a vice-presidential candidate and then as a presidential one. Then Bill Clinton defeated Bush in the 1992 race, meaning that he was on the ticket again in 1996. In 2000, George W. Bush won the White House, holding it in 2004. In 2016, it was the Clintons’ turn again, with Hillary Clinton earning the Democratic Party’s presidential nomination.

The pattern almost went from Bush in 2004 to Clinton in 2008, except that Barack Obama edged out the former first lady in that year’s primary. He selected as his running mate Joe Biden — who then won in 2020. And that completes the chain: Bush, Bush, Bush, Bush/Clinton, Clinton, Bush, Bush, Biden, Biden, Clinton, Biden. And now: Donald Trump and Democrat-to-be-named-later-but-probably-Vice-President-Harris.

You’ll notice, though, that Biden is an outlier here. The Bushes and the Clintons are political dynasties (the Bushes extending back earlier, though not in presidential politics). Biden’s a one-man dynasty. In fact, the first ticket on which he appeared, that Obama one in 2008, was seen as a break from this dynastic back-and-forth. But now it’s useful to include him in the pattern because otherwise there’s that gap from 2004 to 2016.

Duke University sociologist Kieran Healy noted on social media that you could cobble together a nearly-as-robust chain from Richard M. Nixon through the Bushes, with Nixon’s election as vice president in 1952 jumping to Bob Dole’s vice-presidential election in 1976 and Dole’s later running as president in 1996, the gap in the Bush pattern. That’s 10 out of 11 contests, the sole exception being the upended 1964 contest.

We can close that gap, too, though. Just make it a Nixon-Johnson (as in Lyndon)-Mondale (as in Walter) chain. That gets you nine of nine elections from 1952 to 1984 — though not thanks to multiple candidates from one political family.

If we’re willing to let that 1964 race go empty, we can extend the Nixon pattern in the other direction. There was only one election between the one in which Nixon first won the vice presidency and the last of Franklin D. Roosevelt’s four. Use Harry S. Truman as a convenient bit of political glue and you get a 10 of 11 chain running from 1932 to 1972.

But Roosevelt is a Roosevelt, a member of a family that had seen a president before his four consecutive electoral victories. In fact, by looping in Theodore Roosevelt, Grover Cleveland’s three straight presidential bids and the various bids of William Jennings Bryan and his brother Charles, we can get 14 out of 16 contests from 1884 to 1944: Cleveland, Cleveland, Cleveland, Bryan, Bryan/Roosevelt, Roosevelt, Bryan, Roosevelt, (no one, though Roosevelt earned delegates to be the Republican nominee), Roosevelt, Bryan, (no one), Roosevelt, Roosevelt, Roosevelt and Roosevelt.

Not consecutive, but still two dramatic political dynasties.

The mention of Grover Cleveland is a reminder that Biden’s withdrawal upends another historical parallel. Had the November contest been Biden vs. Trump, it would have mirrored the 1892 election in which Cleveland challenged the man who defeated him four years before.

We should also note, though, that declarations that the Bush-Clinton-Biden era has ended are premature. Kamala Harris could select former Texas land commissioner George P. Bush to be her running mate to carry the Lone Star State. Or could pick, say, Hunter Biden, just to give Republicans apoplexy.

The thing about dynasties is that they’re only over when they’re over. We are still only five campaigns into the Biden-Trump chain of nominations, after all. Certainly seems as though this one could extend indefinitely into the future.

Vice President Harris has declined to preside over the Senate chamber when Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu addresses a joint meeting of Congress on Wednesday afternoon, according to two people familiar with her plans who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss private conversations.

Netanyahu, who has clashed with President Biden over his handling of the war in Gaza, is expected to meet with Harris at another point during his visit, however, according to a U.S. official. He will also probably meet with Biden during his time in Washington.

As Harris seeks the Democratic presidential nomination after Biden’s departure from the campaign, all eyes will be on how she navigates the inflammatory and divisive issue of Israel’s war in Gaza after the Oct. 7 attack on the country by Hamas. Harris’s team informed the Senate she would not preside over the Netanyahu speech even before Biden announced Sunday that he was no longer running for reelection. A Harris spokesperson did not respond to a request for comment.

Democrats are deeply divided over the war, and dozens of liberal lawmakers are expected to boycott Netanyahu’s speech, saying they fear he is using them as a prop to bolster his shaky political standing at home. Republicans have banded together in support of Netanyahu, attacking Democrats for any criticism of the prime minister, and House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) threatened to have anyone who disrupts the event arrested.

Sen. Patty Murray (D-Wash.) also declined to preside over the joint meeting, according to her spokesman. Sen. Ben Cardin (D-Md.), chair of the Foreign Relations Committee, will perform the ceremonial role, according to a person familiar with his plans. Cardin, who is Jewish, is retiring at the end of the year.

The scramble over who would preside over the Senate underscores the awkwardness of the speech for Democrats, who voted in large numbers this spring to send billions of dollars in additional military support to Israel but who have also agonized over Netanyahu’s tactics and the humanitarian catastrophe that has unfolded across the strip.

White House officials have in private tried to distance themselves from Netanyahu’s visit, telling people they were not involved in the invitation, according to two people who have spoken to senior officials directly. Before he dropped out, Biden was expected to travel to Texas on the day of Netanyahu’s address to Congress and miss the speech.

As vice president, Harris is also president of the Senate, and casts the deciding vote on legislation or nominations in cases where the vote is tied. She rarely presides over congressional proceedings, however, except in special cases such as a joint meeting.

Harris has at times been the highest-ranking member of the Biden administration to question the way Israel has prosecuted its war against Hamas and to speak out about the scale of civilian casualties, sparking some fears in Israel that she could take a tougher tack than Biden on the war effort if she were to win in 2024.

“As Israel defends itself, it matters how,” Harris said in December. “Too many innocent Palestinians have been killed. Frankly, the scale of civilian suffering and the images and videos coming from Gaza are devastating.”

More than 39,000 Palestinians have been killed during Israel’s assault, according to the Gaza Health Ministry, after Hamas’s Oct. 7 attack in Israel that killed about 1,200 people and left hundreds taken hostage. Biden, a staunch defender of Israel, has clashed with Netanyahu over his insistence that Israel allow more humanitarian aid into Gaza and over a temporary pause on the delivery of certain weapons.

MIDDLETOWN, Ohio — A week after Ohio Sen. J.D. Vance became Donald Trump’s running mate, set to take on President Biden’s running mate Kamala D. Harris, he faced an unexpected challenge: Harris is likely to top the Democratic ticket and her vice-presidential pick is unknown.

So in his first solo rally, Vance instead took aim Monday at the Democratic Party as a whole, claiming without evidence that Biden was pushed out by a group of party elites and accusing Democrats of being anti-democratic given the president’s announcement Sunday that he would withdraw as their presumptive nominee. Vance suggested the decision was made by former president Barack Obama and Democratic megadonor George Soros, two figures often cast as boogeymen by the far right.

“The idea of selecting the Democrat party’s nominee, because George Soros and Barack Obama and a couple of elite Democrats got in a smoke-filled room and decided to throw Joe Biden overboard, that is not how it works,” Vance said to cheers from hundreds of supporters gathered at his alma mater high school. “That’s a threat to democracy.”

His audience nodded along with his attacks, applauding when he said the vice president was unpatriotic because she hadn’t expressed enough gratitude for the country.

The Harris team quickly retorted by pointing to the Trump campaign’s billionaire donors and hinting at Vance’s connections to Silicon Valley as a former venture capitalist.

“That’s rich coming from extremist JD Vance, who is bought and paid for by Elon Musk and Silicon Valley and has promised to raise taxes on working families and give handouts to corporations and billionaires,” said Harris campaign spokesman Joseph Costello.

The attacks offered the first glimpse of Vance workshopping his role on the ticket, to be deployed by the GOP to appeal to Republican voters and disparage the Democratic Party given its weeks of hand-wringing and rancor after Biden’s disastrous performance in the first presidential debate.

Vance, a freshman senator, would be the least experienced vice president in decades if elected. But voters in attendance here were unconcerned about his ability to take on whomever the Democrats choose as their vice-presidential candidate. Die-hard Trump fans in attendance said they were confident now more than ever, a week after Trump was wounded at a rally in Butler, Pa., that the electorate would overwhelmingly choose the Republican ticket.

“It doesn’t matter,” retired social worker Leona Rader, 71, of New Carlisle, Ohio, said of Democrats’ unknown running mate. “Trump and Vance are going to win. Vance is a check mark for Trump.”

Rader and others remarked on the senator’s eloquence and predicted he could face off against any potential challenge in a debate. In his deliberations for his running mate, Trump considered Vance’s ability to defend him in TV interviews a major plus.

Yet outside Middletown High School, local Democrats were abuzz with excitement for Harris as their likely presidential candidate. Cleveland Canova, the Democratic candidate for a nearby statehouse seat, stood with a sign reading “TRUMP KILLED ROE V WADE” and said Biden’s decision to step aside will likely help the party and other down-ballot Democrats like him.

“It was a big energy boost for the whole party,” he said.

Vance is expected to travel extensively in the coming months, speaking in battleground states about his hardscrabble background growing up in Ohio with family members who suffered from poverty and drug addiction, as he documented in his bestseller “Hillbilly Elegy.”

And he hinted at his excitement to take on Democrats, saying he was “pissed off” he couldn’t debate Harris. “I was told I was going to get to debate Kamala Harris, and now President Trump’s going to get to debate her,” he said to laughter from the crowd.

After Vance was tapped as Trump’s running mate last week, Harris called the Ohio lawmaker and encouraged him to pick a date for their debate. The Trump campaign responded that it couldn’t lock in a date until the Democratic ticket is set.

“To do so would be unfair to Gavin Newsom, J.B. Pritzker, Gretchen Whitmer, or whoever Kamala Harris picks as her running mate,” Trump campaign senior adviser Brian Hughes said in a statement.

One woman was putting her toddler to bed in Baltimore when her phone pinged. Another in Washington saw it while doom-scrolling. A third sat on the deck of her Connecticut home talking about chores with her husband when the WhatsApp message came.

They were all hearing about the same thing: a Sunday night Zoom call organized to support the nascent presidential bid of Vice President Harris — who could be the first Black woman elected president — after President Biden announced the end of his candidacy earlier that day.

More than 44,000 people logged onto a Zoom call to support Harris and raised more than $1.5 million for her campaign in three hours, according to Win With Black Women founder Jotaka Eaddy.

“Anybody that does not think that Black and Brown women are the backbone of this party, they don’t know us,” Star Jones, the lawyer and former talk show host, told The Washington Post. “[Harris] has already been leading by example. We are going to support her, we’re going to raise money for her, and we’re going to get out the vote for her.”

The call shows the ways in which Black women, a key Democratic voting bloc, plan to galvanize and organize to support Harris. The call, which attracted several celebrities and political figures, was off the record and everyone spoke in their personal capacities, but many attendees described to The Post that it felt like church, a family reunion, a rally or the online hangouts from the height of quarantine.

Even though they were told not to, people streamed the Zoom on other sites such as Clubhouse, Twitch and YouTube.

Eaddy organized the Zoom call the same way in which she has hosted most Sunday night calls for Win With Black Women since August 2020. The organization says it aims to elect Black women nationwide and speaks out against racism and sexism. At the height of the 2020 election, she said the most attendees she had on one Zoom call was 1,500 people. Eaddy was expecting a few hundred last night.

But she realized something was different around 2 p.m., when she got a message that 50 people were in the Zoom waiting room. The call was set to start at 8:30 p.m.

By 7:50 p.m., the Zoom was at capacity with 1,000 people. Members contacted Zoom, which moved the group to a webinar, giving them unlimited capacity to expand their attendees.

“I am forever grateful to the leadership of Zoom for what they did,” Eaddy said.

She said “allies” who identify as Latinx, Asian American and Pacific Islander, and Black men joined the Zoom to show their support. But the majority of the call focused on Black women’s collective power to elect Harris.

“What happened last night was historic,” Eaddy said. “It really is the culmination of so many Black women for years and years and years that have been working, cultivating and creating for this moment. And last night was also a homage, a work to them and their sacrifice.”

Bernice King, the youngest child of Martin Luther King Jr.; 85-year-old Rep. Maxine Waters (D-Calif.), the most senior Black woman in the House; and Donna Brazile, the two-time acting chair of the Democratic National Committee, each spoke during the call. Jones, actress Jenifer Lewis, first lady of Maryland Dawn Moore, radio host Angela Rye, U.S. Senate hopeful Angela D. Alsobrooks and author Luvvie Ajayi Jones also joined.

Many representatives of the nine Black sororities and fraternities that exist under the National Pan-Hellenic Council, known as the Divine Nine, also spoke. Alpha Kappa Alpha, of which Harris is a member, formed the first Black sorority in 1908.

Naima Cochrane, a music industry executive and writer, spent the early part of her Sunday afternoon shocked about Biden’s announcement. She said she was not confident in American voters, though she was confident about Harris. But the call lit a fire under her.

“There was no conversation about doubt. There was no ‘what if we can’t’; it was ‘this is what we’re about to do,’” Cochrane said. “People needed to know directives. That there is a strategy, that we’re unified in messaging, and their next steps. We can go forward confidently and strongly now to combat misinformation and combat naysayers.”

D.C. Mayor Muriel E. Bowser (D), who has endorsed Harris, said she got at least 10 messages from people telling her about the Zoom call. Bowser told The Post on Monday that she was at an event celebrating Washington’s restaurant scene when she joined the call. When other women heard she was stepping out to log on, they asked if they could come. So a dozen women huddled around an iPhone outside the event and listened.

Bowser said there was “collective anxiety about what is coming.” She said the women are expecting sexist attacks against Harris from political opponents. She logged on again on her way home. After putting her daughter to sleep and walking the family’s dog, she logged on for a third time. The call, Bowser said, “is indicative of what these women are going to do over the next several months.”

The founder of Black Girls Vote, Nykidra “Nyki” Robinson, said she received the Zoom link about 15 times, starting at 3 p.m. After putting her 2-year-old to sleep, she joined the call at 9:40 p.m.

“Sometimes we work in silos, but I felt a sense of community being on the call and feel better equipped to mobilize young voters,” she said.

“I hope Joe Biden feels the love. We’re grateful for him,” Robinson said. “We’re also really excited to support Harris in this moment in history. The call was very much about sisterhood, unity and love.”

Jane, a Black woman in Connecticut who spoke to The Post on the condition that only her first name be published because she feared retribution from her employer, spent last night watching the Zoom call from her kitchen island on speakerphone as one of her 11-year-old sons listened in. He asked her whether Harris would be president, and she explained to him how the nomination process works.

She said she was glad her son saw a group of Black women come together so quickly to support each other.

“This is a message to the world,” she said. “Don’t underestimate Black women in this country and the reach we have. Sometimes we’re ignored, but you would want to be our friends because that’s how fast we were able to get that information out. It was lightning speed.”

Mariam Sarr logged on to the Zoom at 10 p.m. determined to make sure the Democratic Party does not “skip over Harris.”

“As a young Black woman in corporate America, I know what it feels like to be passed over. I feel energized in a way like I did in 2008. I actively campaigned for Obama when I was in college and hit the streets campaigning. Last night felt like the same way.”

On Monday night, political commentator Roland Martin will host his own online discussion with the Win With Black Men group.

Star Jones, who has known Harris for several years and is a founding member of Win With Black Women, was tasked with fundraising. As the creator of the Brown Girls Fundraising Collective, Jones told The Post that she spent last night at a dinner with people working to see how they could fund Harris’s campaign. She got a fundraising link together but had no graphics. Leaders of the Zoom call told her to join around 11:43 p.m.

She told the attendees the challenge was to raise $1 million over the next 100 days. She dropped the fundraising link at 11:50 p.m. “Within 100 minutes we raised $1 million,” Jones said.

The money will go directly to the Harris presidential campaign, according to Jones.

“People don’t tend to think we actually have the power of the pocketbook,” Jones said. “So in addition to what we spend as consumers, we actually do give in a political climate when we feel we have skin in the game.”

As of 1:30 p.m. Monday, Jones said they had raised more than $1.6 million dollars from more than 13,000 donors.

Democratic leaders on Monday laid out a new process for selecting a presidential nominee to replace President Biden through a virtual process that would conclude by Aug. 7, well before the party’s nominating convention in Chicago next month.

“Working with the Convention Rules Committee, the Democratic Party is prepared to shift the nominating portion of the Convention to an electronic format to ensure that our Democratic nominees for President and Vice President are certified before state ballot access deadlines,” Democratic National Committee chair Jaime Harrison and Rules Committee co-chair Minyon Moore wrote in a memo.

Party officials said they have ruled out an “in-person contested convention” because of ballot access deadlines, potential Republican legal challenges and the need to vet a vice-presidential candidate.

The virtual process will be open to any candidate who gets 300 signatures from elected convention delegates, with no more than 50 from any single state. Candidates would also have to show that they are qualified for the job of president and are qualified members of the Democratic Party.

“As it stands, no candidate has secured a majority of the delegates to the convention,” Moore said.

The dates for that process will be announced on Wednesday when the convention Rules Committee meets virtually. Voting by electronic ballot could be completed as soon as Aug. 1, officials said.

If more than one candidate qualifies, then the voting could be completed as late as Aug. 7. A vice presidential nominee may be selected before or after the Aug. 7 date, depending on the desires of the presidential nominee.

A delegate directory will be provided to potential candidates so that they can begin to seek out votes. Delegates will have the ability to opt into communications from candidates.

So-called superdelegates — party officials who are appointed to a convention role outside the primary system — will not have their votes counted on the first ballot, unless it is clear that one candidate has a majority of the pledged delegate support, officials said.

“We are committed to an open and fair nominating process,” Harrison said.

Nearly all likely elected Democrats have ruled out challenging Vice President Harris for the presidential nomination, after Biden bowed out of the race on Sunday. Harris has been endorsed by Biden, and has taken control of Biden’s campaign apparatus.

Author Marianne Williamson, who challenged Biden in the earlier primaries but garnered little support, has said she has been seeking delegate support.