Elena Moore

Update at 10:40 p.m. ET: Sen. Ed Markey has topped Rep. Joe Kennedy, while Rep. Richard Neal beat Alex Morse. Read more about Markey's win here.

Massachusetts voters are to cast ballots Tuesday in one of the last state primaries of the year.

On the first day of the Republican convention in Charlotte, N.C., more than five months after the coronavirus began spreading across the country, President Trump characterized the White House's response as "the exact right thing."

But, following a blueprint he has used for months, he also shifted responsibility for the pandemic response to the states. He accused many governors of having been "ill-prepared" for the pandemic, while praising others for doing a "fine job."

Updated at 9:30 p.m. ET Sunday

Follow live coverage of the RNC all week at NPR.org/conventions.

The Republican National Convention kicked off on Monday, just days after Joe Biden accepted the Democratic Party's presidential nomination, and runs through Thursday.

A small number of Republican leaders were physically present in Charlotte, N.C., on Monday, but most of the convention will be virtual.

An extraordinarily high number of ballots — more than 550,000 — have been rejected in this year's presidential primaries, according to a new analysis by NPR.

That's far more than the 318,728 ballots rejected in the 2016 general election and has raised alarms about what might happen in November when tens of millions of more voters are expected to cast their ballots by mail, many for the first time.

Updated Aug. 17 at 12:31 p.m. ET

The next phase of the presidential election started Monday with the launch of the Democratic National Convention. While the quadrennial event usually attracts tens of thousands of people to the host city, which this year is Milwaukee, Wis., the coronavirus has erased the possibility of a traditional series of events.

Rep. Ilhan Omar has won her primary, informally securing a hold on Minnesota's historically Democratic-run 5th Congressional District, The Associated Press projects.

After a high-profile first term in Congress, the freshman representative faced several primary challengers, the most prominent being Antone Melton-Meaux, a first-time political candidate who runs a mediation company.

Kansas Rep. Roger Marshall has defeated former Kansas Secretary of State Kris Kobach in the Republican Senate primary, according to The Associated Press, calming Republicans' worst fears about putting a seat in a deep red state in play this fall with the Senate majority contested.

Democratic Senate candidate Jon Ossoff is blasting a now-deleted attack ad from his incumbent Republican rival, Sen. David Perdue, that appears to engage in anti-Semitic tropes.

"For my opponent to stoop to this kind of incredibly divisive, inappropriate, offensive tactic is really disturbing," Ossoff, who is Jewish, said Tuesday at a virtual news conference, "and it's unbecoming of a sitting U.S. senator."

The University of Notre Dame will no longer host the first presidential debate on September 29, citing "constraints" brought on by the coronavirus pandemic.

"The necessary health precautions would have greatly diminished the educational value of hosting the debate on our campus," University President Reverend John I. Jenkins announced Monday.

Challenger Jamaal Bowman has defeated longtime U.S. Rep. Eliot Engel in the Democratic primary for New York's 16th Congressional District, The Associated Press projects.

Updated at 4:45 a.m. ET on Wednesday

Jeff Sessions has lost a bid to regain his old Alabama U.S. Senate after falling from grace as President Trump's attorney general.

Sessions had been hoping for redemption after enduring months of relentless ridicule from Trump that eventually led to his resignation as the country's top lawyer.

Mail-in voting, which tens of millions of Americans are expected to use this November, is fraught with potential problems. Hundreds of thousands of ballots go uncounted each year because people make mistakes, such as forgetting to sign the form or sending it in too late.

The general election matchup is set in New Jersey's 2nd Congressional District, where the first-term incumbent flipped his party affiliation from Democrat to Republican.

Former Vice President Joe Biden took direct aim at President Trump on Tuesday, saying that Trump, who once called himself a "wartime president" taking on the coronavirus pandemic, seems to have now "surrendered."

"Remember when he exhorted the nation to sacrifice together in the face of this ... 'invisible enemy'? What happened? Now it's almost July, and it seems like our wartime president has surrendered," Biden said in prepared remarks.

Updated at 6 p.m. ET

The Democratic Party's more establishment wing is victorious in a high-profile Kentucky Senate primary despite a late surge from a rising progressive lawmaker.

Retired Marine fighter pilot Amy McGrath has beaten state Rep. Charles Booker in the state's Democratic U.S. Senate contest, The Associated Press projects.

The call came Tuesday, a week after the primary, as absentee ballots were counted.

McGrath will now face Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, who easily won the Republican primary.