By David Averre
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Texas is supposed to be where Republicans go when they want to feel safe. President Donald Trump carried the state by 14 points in 2024, and Democrats have not won a statewide election there in more than three decades. Red or dead, as they say.
Yet, for the next two days, the GOP is taking over the American Airlines Center in Dallas for the first-ever midterm election party convention amid fears Republican candidates could suffer a set of nasty defeats this November.
Even Texas itself is providing cause for concern. The Senate race between Republican Ken Paxton and Democrat James Talarico is now rated a toss-up by the Cook Political Report, while Governor Greg Abbott faces a far stiffer challenge than Republicans would have expected just a few months ago.
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But the GOP's solution to drum up support in the Republican heartland looks remarkably similar to the problem that made such an unprecedented midterm convention necessary in the first place.
To treat a snakebite, doctors use antivenom made by exposing animals to controlled doses of the very poison they are trying to neutralize. The Republican Party is trying the political equivalent: using a controlled dose of Donald Trump to cure the damage caused by Donald Trump.
Can Trump Save the GOP From Himself?
Strip away the balloons, cowboy branding and 109 scheduled segments, and you'll find this is not really a convention in the traditional sense.
The RNC officially describes Dallas as a showcase for its candidates and policies ahead of the midterms, but there are no candidates to nominate and no platform to approve. In reality, the two-day event is a love fest for the one man not up for election this year.
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Trump will make appearances at the convention on both days, delivering one of two keynote speeches—the other is left to Vice President JD Vance—before closing out the show on Thursday night. Convention attendees will also be able to get their hands on the kind of woefully overpriced merch you would have expected to scoop at a Trump rally in 2024, including a $16 beer koozie depicting the 80-year-old president as the Marlboro Man complete with horseback pose, white Stetson and a "Dallas" logo where the cigarette brand's name would normally sit.
Trump himself has made no attempt to conceal the play.
"The problem that we have," he told supporters recently, is that, when he is not on the ballot, "his people don't come" to vote for senators and members of Congress. "So what I really want you to do is pretend, please, that I'm on the ballot."
It is a bold strategy given the trajectory of his presidency so far.
Trump began this term with an approval rating of 47 percent, according to Ipsos polling. In the latest survey, conducted August 28-31, just 33 percent of Americans approved of Trump’s performance. Among independents, the slide is even more pronounced: a 20 percentage point slide from 42 to 22.
Meanwhile, registered voters in the same poll favored a Democratic congressional candidate over a Republican by 43 to 38 percent, while Democrats currently report greater enthusiasm about voting.
The issue voters care about most is particularly concerning for the GOP. Some 47 percent of registered voters named the cost of living as their top consideration for their midterm vote, while 7 in 10 adults surveyed disapproved of Trump’s handling of the issue.
Solving that very problem was among Trump’s biggest campaign promises, yet diesel hit a new record price last week, soaring to an average of $5.85 a gallon for the first time ever, with gasoline not far behind at $4.15 a gallon. Then, the price of crude oil climbed back above $100 a barrel this morning after the U.S. military and Iran traded strikes on ships in the Strait of Hormuz.
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The Trump Tractor Beam
Despite Trump’s historically low approval ratings among Democrats and independents, his base continues to wield huge influence; Ipsos still finds 82 percent of Republicans approving of his presidency, even as another Ipsos poll conducted with ABC News in April found that two-thirds of Americans believe the country is moving in the wrong direction.
What’s more, midterms are less popularity contests than they are turnout contests.
A voter who personally dislikes Trump and decides to vote Democrat is obviously a problem for the GOP. But the biggest threat to Republican candidates in November is apathy.
Polling by the Pew Research Center among registered voters who disapprove of Trump but not strongly, 31 percent say they would still choose a Republican House candidate, while 31 percent would choose a Democrat. Another 28 percent are unsure, and 10 percent say they’d prefer another candidate.
The Democrats themselves are hardly beloved. Pew found 59 percent of Americans held an unfavorable view of the Democratic Party this spring, essentially identical to the 58 percent who disliked the Republicans. More than 1 in 4 disliked both.
Those statistics don’t paint the picture of a disillusioned and vengeful electorate rushing joyfully into Democratic arms. It looks like an electorate full of people who could quite easily stay home.
Faced with this prospect, the GOP has turned to the only individual with enough gravitational pull to coax apathetic citizens off the couch and into the polling station.
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One Big, Beautiful Bet
Trump does not simply mobilize Republicans; he mobilizes everyone else, too.
For every extra Republican voter nudged to the polls by this week's spectacle in Dallas, there could well be an independent reminded why they soured on the president in the first place, or a disengaged citizen leaning Democrat who suddenly finds a reason to care about an otherwise forgettable congressional race.
This week's RNC, then, amounts to one big, beautiful bet: that Trump can turn out more voters than he turns off.
Whether the gamble works will be clear soon enough. The harder question for Republicans comes later.
The GOP has spent the better part of a decade building an electoral machine whose most effective turnout mechanism remains one particular human being. The MAGA movement now has its own institutions, media ecosystem, political language and an entire bench of Republicans eager to inherit it. Trump's slogans can be parroted, his policies inherited and the red hat will survive him.
But make no mistake: without the fiery blond at its center, that MAGA galaxy will begin to break apart.
Trump is 80. When the next midterms arrive in 2030, he will no longer be the president asking supporters to pretend his name is on the ballot. How will the Republican Party galvanize lackluster voters when Trump is no longer a reason to care?
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