The Republican National Committee is hosting its first midterm convention in Dallas Wednesday and Thursday, with President Donald Trump scheduled to give the keynote address at 8 p.m. and other notable Texas Republicans slated to speak as well.
Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton, who's running for a U.S. Senate seat against Democratic state rep. James Talarico, will also speak Wednesday.
The schedule for the convention is packed, and NPR political reporter Stephen Fowler joined NTX Now's Miranda Suarez and Ron Corning to explain what he'll be watching over the next two days.
These interview highlights have been edited for length and clarity. To hear the conversation in full, click the 'listen' button above.
What are you keeping an eye on?
Well, a little bit of everything. This is an unprecedented convention. There's not really a midterm convention, because conventions are where there's party business, where they're nominating the president, where they are kind of rallying around this major election.
So with the midterms, with this convention, it's still a "rally around the flag" moment, but it's because the base is flagging. So you've got some of the most vulnerable incumbents and candidates in the country speaking. You've got members of the president's cabinet speaking and you have this sort of goal of this is what the final two months of the campaign is going to be like from Trump's perspective and from the Republican Party's perspective.
How much went into the decision to have the convention in Texas and in Dallas specifically?
I think when this was put together, which was very last minute compared to the years of planning that goes into the [RNC], it wasn't necessarily done with Texas being potentially the deciding factor in the House and Senate.
It's a state that has a lot of infrastructure for having thousands of people come. It's a state where there's a lot of money, a lot of donor support, and it's a state that Trump has done well in and where there is a receptive audience. So, it just so happens that here we are, Labor Day week, and Texas is going to be one of the deciding factors in how the next two years of politics goes.
Why is that surprising to you for such a reliably red state?
Well, you're in a situation right now where Democrats aren't happy with Trump's second term in office. No surprise there. You have moderates and independents who also aren't happy with a lot of Trump's domestic and foreign policies, and then you have a sizable chunk of Republicans that feel the same way.
So you have places like Texas and Ohio and Iowa that have voted for Republicans historically in large margins that are now on the table [for Democrats] because you have Republican-based voters who might not show up to vote in midterms, especially when Trump's not on the ballot, and then everybody else saying voting against the Republicans in power because of things like the war in Iran or tariffs or inflation or high gas prices. So you have this scenario where Republican states are really feeling the brunt of things politically at a time when it's very unfortunate for them.
Last week, Ken Paxton began talking about affordability for the first time. That’s interesting because arguably the economic downturn and inflation are tied, among other factors, to the war in Iran. How will constituents, who feel this downturn is coming from the top down, respond to Paxton’s attempt to message around it?
Think of the current political landscape here like a couple of Venn diagrams. You've got what voters are feeling and say is important that they want their elected officials to do. You've got Republican candidates in these tight races and what they'd like to focus on, and then you've got Trump and what he says and does.
Right now, there's very little overlap with those three things. So, it is a bit of a challenge to talk about affordability, to talk about the cost of living and say, things are expensive for reasons. We're going to fix it for reasons, and so you do have that tightrope walking.
It's a situation where, again, in a state like Texas, when you look at the status quo and the powers that be and the people that are involved, it's Republican controlled state and it has been a Republican controlled state for a long time. So when things aren't going well and somebody has to fix it in the eyes of the voters, Republicans of Washington are responsible — but then also it trickles down to the state level too.
You don't have somebody like, say, Greg Abbott, who can say, 'I'm going to change things and be different than me, the governor.' So that's how you have this situation where you have tens of hundreds of millions of dollars being poured into Texas and other places that in a normal year wouldn't necessarily be given second thought.
I want to ask you about some of the candidates in tight races that are going to be showing up at the convention. What is the benefit for a candidate in a tight race who might be threatened by a Democrat to show up to a convention helmed by a president with low approval ratings?
Trump isn't on the ballot, but he's telling his supporters to act like he is.
There is a large swath of the Republican party that was kind of brought into Republican politics because of Trump. They show up when he tells them to, when he's on the ballot. They support him even when things are kind of tough.
So, they need those as the foundational building blocks to get to 50% plus one vote. At the same time, it runs the risk of alienating those people, even within the Republican Party, who aren't happy with the way things going. So it's a little bit of a darned if you do, darned if you don't [situation], but we're going to spend a lot of money to get it done.
Does it surprise you at all that the general narrative around the Ken Paxton campaign is that he's not campaigning hard enough?
Labor Day is typically the kickoff to general election season. People might have voted in the primaries, but that was a long time ago.
Now is when people are paying attention, now is when people are thinking about when they're going to vote but at the same time, there's a lot of ads that have already been reserved. There's lot of narrative that's already been set, and so you have the situation where for the longest time, the person in the driver's seat of the Texas Senate race has not been Ken Paxton and it may be too late for him to kind of speed up and overtake things.
Miranda Suarez and Ron Corning are the hosts of KERA's NTX Now. Got a tip? Email Miranda at msuarez@kera.org or Ron at rcorning@kera.org.
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