As Joseph R. Biden Jr. prepares to formally accept his party’s nomination for the presidency Thursday, the gap is widening between the optimism of a standard-bearer shaped by his career in a more collegial Congress and the skepticism of current Democratic lawmakers who see a Capitol that would be unrecognizable to the Senator Biden who served there a dozen years ago.
Lawmakers who reach across the aisle these days are more likely to find their hands slapped. And they have a warning for their nominee as he basks at a Democratic convention brimming with nostalgia for an earlier, less polarized political era: A Biden victory, even if accompanied by Democratic majorities in the House and Senate, is more likely to be followed by partisan warfare than bipartisan bonhomie.
Democrats are eager to see if Republicans will prove more willing to negotiate should they lose the White House and Senate, and many in the party are willing to initially defer to a Biden charm campaign.
But a range of Democratic lawmakers say they may be willing to scrap the Senate’s filibuster rule and govern by partisan muscle if Republicans prove recalcitrant.
“We have to get a lot done,” said Senator Chuck Schumer of New York, who would become majority leader if Democrats take control of the Senate. “The nation demands it, and nothing is off the table.”
Senator Richard J. Durbin of Illinois, the second-ranking Democrat, said, “the Senate of 12 years ago does not exist today.”
Or as Senator Christopher S. Murphy of Connecticut put it: “Shame on me if I went to kick the football after it was pulled out from under me six times.”
President Trump may yet eke out a victory in November, and even if he loses, Democrats must net at least three Senate seats to capture the majority. A Republican Senate would force a President Biden to negotiate any legislation with the opposition and doom the progressive push that Democrats are clamoring for in this election.
Even if Democrats win the White House and Congress, their road next year could still be rocky. After the last Democratic sweep, in 2008, the Republicans’ Senate leader, Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, told his diminished ranks they would remain relevant only if they banded together in strict opposition to President Barack Obama. They largely did.
“Mitch McConnell just says no to everything,” said Senator Debbie Stabenow, Democrat of Michigan.
The picture painted in the convention video of the “unlikely friendship” between Mr. Biden and John McCain, in which senators of differing parties fight it out during the day, gather for fellowship at night and proudly come together for the good of the nation in the end, could not be drawn today.
The former vice president, who served in the Senate for 36 years, would arrive in the White House with the most high-level legislative experience of any president since Lyndon B. Johnson. Like Mr. Johnson, he would take office at a traumatic moment — a lethal virus raging, tens of millions out of work and racial tensions boiling — but he would find a far more polarized capital than Mr. Johnson did.
There are fewer moderates in both parties, and a Democratic sweep would most likely mean that one of the few deal-makers left in the Senate — Susan Collins of Maine — would be defeated.
The pillars of the Senate that Mr. Biden last served in are gone: Mr. McCain, Edward M. Kennedy, Robert C. Byrd, Daniel K. Inouye and Ted Stevens have all died, and Harry Reid has retired.
Mr. Schumer is reluctant to scrap the chamber’s filibuster rule, which requires 60 votes to pass most legislation, knowing that Republicans would some day return to the majority. But he has been informally polling his caucus about what he should do next year, according to Democratic senators who have spoken to him.
In an interview, Mr. Schumer, who is facing immense pressure from the left to let a simple majority rule and is facing a potential primary of his own in 2022, said that while he hoped “Republicans will see the light,” Democrats would push their agenda “with them or without them.”
Mr. Reid, the last Democratic majority leader, was blunter.
“To think that, with what McConnell has done to change the Senate forever, he is going to step in there and things will be just hunky dory, it won’t be,” Mr. Reid said. “If he wants to be a president who wants to be known for getting something done, he can’t need 60 votes for everything.” (It was Mr. Reid who terminated the filibuster on most judicial nominations).
A range of lawmakers, from Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont on the left to Senator Chris Coons of Delaware in the center, are reassessing their support of the legislative filibuster, egged on by Mr. Obama, who used Representative John Lewis’s funeral to announce his support for scrapping the 60-vote majority.
Many of Mr. Biden’s closest advisers and former colleagues say he is still loath to burn bridges with Republicans. He’s the same man, they say, who supported civil rights as a young senator but still worked with the Senate’s arch segregationists, something he boasted about as recently as last year.
“This convention gives you a very good sense of his belief that you can find common ground with everybody,” said Anita Dunn, one of his top strategists.
Recently, though, Mr. Biden has suggested the overlapping crises demand that the government respond the way it did during the Depression and World War II, and he told reporters that Senate Democrats would have “to take a look at” at eliminating or modifying the filibuster should Republicans prove “obstreperous.”
Yet in the same interview, he predicted Senate Republicans would be “liberated” by a Trump loss.
That was not his experience in 2009, when Republican leaders steered their members away from cooperating to ameliorate the last economic downturn or pass health care legislation. Instead, they believed they could more effectively tap into voter anger in the midterms if they united in opposition.
“If they choose to repeat 2009, and McConnell slaps his hand away, then we’ve got choices to make,” said Mr. Coons, who in 2017 co-wrote a bipartisan letter defending the filibuster. He added, “If we’re six months into it and they’re blocking every piece of legislation, I’m willing to re-examine my commitment to defending the filibuster.”
Some progressives say Democrats cannot afford to wait six weeks, let alone six months.
“We just need to get enough votes to pass our bills, that’s the bottom line,” said Jamaal Bowman, the New York progressive who this summer defeated the long-serving Representative Eliot L. Engel in a primary that reflected the new activism of the Democratic Party. “I would advise a President Biden to tap into the energy taking place in the streets of America, harness it and leverage it.”
Some Democratic senators still believe they can gather enough Republican support to keep the filibuster and legislate effectively, especially on job-creating measures like infrastructure funding.
”These are bipartisan issues,” said Senator Tom Carper of Delaware.
Mr. Biden, however, is eyeing a more aggressive opening salvo.
“We have to tackle both public health and the economy at the same time,” said Jake Sullivan, a senior campaign adviser.
The ultimate solution for Senate Democrats may be to find a way around the 60-vote rule without scrapping it entirely. “You don’t have to eliminate it, you could just trim its sails,” Mr. Murphy said.
Speaker Nancy Pelosi suggested using a budget rule called “reconciliation” to pass some big-ticket legislation with a simple Senate majority, the way Mr. Trump and congressional Republicans passed their tax overhaul and tried to repeal the Affordable Care Act.
“That’s always an option for us,” she said.
If the Democrats claim control of Washington, the Republican response could determine how the majority proceeds.
At least one Republican facing a competitive re-election in a state that rewards bipartisanship, Senator Steve Daines of Montana, said he could work with Mr. Biden.
“I think one of Obama’s mistakes was not allowing Joe Biden to be more engaged with the Senate,” said Mr. Daines, citing the former vice president’s long legislative history.
Many Democrats, however, are skeptical such attitudes would prevail.
“My sense is he will find, unfortunately, that the people you could work with in the past are largely gone or their voices are so muted you cannot hear them,” said former Senator Kent Conrad, Democrat of North Dakota.
Former Senator Charles S. Robb of Virginia, who married Lyndon Johnson’s elder daughter, said Mr. Biden’s “natural inclination is, to use a term associated with my father-in-law, to bring us together.”
“But,” he added, “I can’t think of a time when we’ve been this divided as a country.”
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