Photo

Good Thursday morning from Washington as Cleveland bustles with preparations for the first debates of the 2016 election season. Fox News moderators are looking to keep the top 10 candidates on their toes as they wrangle in prime-time, while the seven other candidates will have their say hours earlier. For each group, the preseason is over.

The stage is set. The lights are ready. The candidates have crammed. And the political world is counting down the clock.

The heavily hyped, first sanctioned Republican presidential debate will air at 9 p.m., co-hosted by Fox News and Facebook. The selection process for which 10 candidates would make the stage was executed with all the buildup of an episode of “The Apprentice,” the reality television show that Donald J. Trump helped create.

The main question for Thursday night is whether the debate, too, will seem like an episode of “The Apprentice,” with the candidates ringed around Mr. Trump, who, as the front-runner in the polls, will be at the center podium. The candidates who have all been drowned out by the deluge of Trump news in the last two months will do whatever they can to break through.

Mr. Trump is one of two men to watch closely. The other is Jeb Bush, who stumbled Tuesday on a question about Planned Parenthood before a culturally conservative audience and who will have to soothe the jitters among his supporters about his performance over the long term.

As for the candidates who only just made it in, the debate offers Gov. John R. Kasich of Ohio the chance to introduce himself, while Gov. Chris Christie of New Jersey, who was praised for his web video criticizing Hillary Rodham Clinton this week, can use his minutes to remind people of his moxie as a fighter.

Maggie Haberman

Stay tuned throughout the day: Follow us on Twitter @NYTpolitics and on Facebook for First Draft updates.

A former Fortune 500 chief executive, a sitting governor, three former governors, the 2012 Republican runner-up and a sitting senator will take the stage in Cleveland on Thursday.

But not at the main event.

The seven candidates who are currently at the bottom of national polls – Rick Santorum (the runner-up), Carly Fiorina (the chief executive), Gov. Bobby Jindal of Louisiana, Senator Lindsey Graham of South Carolina, and the former governors, Rick Perry, George E. Pataki and Jim Gilmore — will face off in an earlier debate, beginning at 5 p.m. or what Mr. Graham’s campaign termed “the Happy Hour debate.”

Reactions to being relegated were mostly staid, save Mr. Santorum’s, as each candidate geared up for their turn in the slightly-less-bright spotlight.

But the earlier debaters hold two potential advantages over their prime-time friends: with fewer candidates on stage, they will have more time on camera to articulate their arguments. Anyone who saw Mr. Graham rush through his opening statement in the Voters First Forum in New Hampshire on Monday knows that will be a welcome change.

They also don’t have to worry about the great wild card, Mr. Trump, hijacking the debate with either inflammatory comments or rambling statements, which Mr. Perry may have been alluding to in his tweet welcoming the second-tier debate.

“I look forward to being @FoxNews 5pm debate for what will be a serious exchange of ideas & positive solutions to get America back on track,” he wrote.

— Nick Corasaniti

Times reporters will provide instant analysis, fact-checking and viewer reactions during the debates, with coverage beginning at 4:30 p.m. Follow along on your phone or computer at nytimes.com, facebook.com/nytpolitics and twitter.com/nytpolitics.

To mark the 50th birthday of the Voting Rights Act of 1965, President Obama, Attorney General Loretta E. Lynch, and Representative John Lewis of Georgia, will participate in an online video conference to “discuss the significance” of the legislation.

Senator Mitch McConnell, Republican of Kentucky and the majority leader, will hold a news conference at the Senate. While the House has already left for its August recess, the Senate has been trying to clear its to-do list before its own break while hitting snags on efforts to defund Planned Parenthood and to pass a cybersecurity bill.

And the Historical Congressional Cemetery will be full of goats. Thirty dairy goats will pick up where they left off in previous years, the cemetery says, helping to clear the grounds of invasive species like poison ivy. Visitors “are welcome to grab a glass of wine and take a short walk” to watch the cleanup crew.

As the Republican rivals attack Mrs. Clinton in their party’s first presidential debate on Thursday, Mrs. Clinton will drift above it all.

Literally.

An aide said she would not watch the Fox News debate because she would be on an airplane flying between fund-raisers on the West Coast.

On Thursday, Mrs. Clinton, who is focusing on Mr. Bush as the likely nominee anyway, will be talking to donors in Los Angeles and speaking to home health care workers with the Service Employees International Union.

“They’re trying to make the case about her and she’s out there making the case of what she’s going to do for the American people,” the Clinton campaign’s pollster, Joel Benenson, said of the Republicans.

Mrs. Clinton will skip another union event, the Iowa Federation of Labor, which is holding its annual convention in Altoona this week. Her Democratic rivals, including Martin O’Malley, Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont, Jim Webb and Lincoln Chafee, all plan to speak at the influential union gathering in the crucial early nominating state.

Mr. O’Malley will greet the A.F.L.-C.I.O. members and leaders soon after being criticized by a labor leader for his stance against the construction of the Keystone pipeline, which environmentalists have lobbied hard to prevent

In a letter to Mr. O’Malley, Terry O’Sullivan, president of the Laborers’ International Union of North America, said his opposition to the pipeline project was “pandering to extremist and elitist” environmentalists and amounted to “an attack on the jobs of thousands of members” of the group, according to BloombergPolitics. (A spokeswoman for Mr. O’Malley said that his clean energy plan would create jobs.)

The criticism against O’Malley speaks to how politically tricky the pipeline is — and may explain why Mrs. Clinton has remained mum on the issue.

— Amy Chozick

In a speech at American University that invoked the legacy of John F. Kennedy, Mr. Obama said that the nuclear deal with Iran was a choice between diplomacy and “some sort of war.”

A supporter and former close adviser to Senator Rand Paul of Kentucky has been charged with hiding secret payments to secure the endorsement of an Iowa lawmaker during the 2012 presidential campaign of the senator’s father, former Representative Ron Paul of Tennessee, the Justice Department said on Wednesday.

Mr. Sanders will speak next month at Liberty University in Lynchburg, Va., the conservative institution founded by Jerry Falwell, a seemingly prerequisite platform for Republican presidential candidates, but a rare venue for Democrats.

And before the debate, the social media platform Snapchat will begin displaying untraditional campaign ads that can be shared by users and are targeted at young voters, an example of the expanding options available to political advertisers who are often clawing for a way to stand out in the digital sphere.

He has compared Mr. Trump to hot-dog-stuffed pizza crust, called Mr. Perry a comedian’s gift from God and said that Senator Ted Cruz of Texas was a dirty syrup guzzler (Canadian), but after Thursday night, “The Democalypse” 2016 will with be without its nightly newscaster.

Jon Stewart signs off on Thursday after more than 16 years behind the desk of “The Daily Show.” His departure will spare this year’s crop of presidential candidates of their nightly lampooning and cable news will get a reprieve from his hectoring over horse race coverage.

Although Mr. Stewart said he had grown weary of the show after so many years, his valedictory episode will surely be bittersweet as he leaves behind a colorful palette of White House hopefuls.

While much of his attention tends to fall on the follies of Republicans, Democrats such as Mrs. Clinton will be free of Mr. Stewart’s riffs on her lunch habits, her ability to adopt regional dialects and her relentless desire to be president.

As he said after one of Mrs. Clinton’s recent discussions about immigration in which he suggested she was pandering to Latinos: “Are we done here, people?”

— Alan Rappeport

The challenge for the candidates relegated to the earlier debate is to find a way to maintain a visual presence over the next few days. For Mr. Jindal, that means joining BuzzFeed for a pushup contest against some of his policy peeves, “Taxes,” “Obamacare,” and “Hyphenated-Americans.”

Patrick J. Buchanan, a speechwriter for President Richard M. Nixon, and a veteran upstart Republican candidate himself, writes in Newsweek that the polling success of Mr. Sanders and Mr. Trump shows that, “The American political class has failed the country and should be fired.”

And Rolling Stone offers — for those who wield them responsibly, of course — “The Official G.O.P. Debate Drinking Game Rules.”

Many of the top Republican donors are still sitting on the sidelines, and Thursday night’s debate performances could help get them off the fence, Politico reports.

Photo

Like the Politics Newsletter? Get it delivered to your inbox.