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Midterm conventions are a calculated risk.
Just ask any Democrat who remembers their party's 1978 gathering in Memphis, where a panel discussion on health care policy laid bare the internal party split that led Sen. Edward Kennedy to challenge President Jimmy Carter's renomination two years later.
That kind of internal division probably won't occur when the Republicans hold their first ever mid-term convention next week in Dallas. It's basically intended as a 12-hour Republican infomercial in which the Trump administration's tight control of the GOP will likely prevent any dissent — at least inside the hall.
The Republican party's risk is just the opposite: too much control by the White House -- producing endless, boring policy speeches -- and too much glorification of an unpopular president who is likely to be a significant drag on its chances in November's mid-term elections.
Recent polls show Trump's national job approval in the mid-30s with more opposition than support for specific policies. It's even down in Texas, which Trump easily carried three times and where the state GOP seems determined to make itself Trumpier than Trump.
The most recent survey by the University of Texas' nonpartisan Texas Politics Project shows Trump's favorability at 42 and his unfavorability at 51, his largest negative gap in the decade since the 2016 election.
The same poll showed Democratic Senate candidate James Talarico with a three-point lead over Republican Ken Paxton. But Gov. Greg Abbott and the rest of the GOP state ticket led their Democratic opponents by single digits.
Despite Trump's unpopularity, participants in the Dallas convention are likely to give the same unremittingly positive presentations as Trump, proclaiming "promises kept" despite high gas prices at home and an unpopular war abroad. Any criticism is likely to come from outside protest groups.
The president himself set the convention's script when he decided the only way to head off significant GOP election losses was to make the November mid-term election a referendum on himself, despite his low job approval ' an approach Democrats welcomed.
Previewing that appeal, Trump asked supporters in South Carolina's recent special election to "pretend, please, that I'm on the ballot," telling a rally for appointed Sen. Darline Graham: "Just say that I'm on the ballot one more time."
That pitch helped her win by a small primary margin and could motivate some reluctant Trump voters elsewhere. But it seems a highly questionable strategy for general elections in swing districts and states, where independents ' and even some Trump voters ' have turned sharply against him.
In that context, one interesting aspect of the Dallas convention will be which GOP candidates decide to come and which stay away.
Trump is scheduled to speak both nights, though his main address will be the final "keynote" address Sept. 1. Before that, the Republican National Committee has scheduled some 109 speeches in two six-hour sessions, including Wednesday night's "keynote" by Vice President JD Vance.
Speakers are organized to promote an array of administration domestic policies and proposals, and to contrast the GOP's "mainstream" policies with the Democrats' "extreme liberal" ones. Reflecting the Iran war's unpopularity, the nearly 40 subjects don't include any on foreign policy, aside from trade and the return of hostages.
How much attention this will receive outside the arena is unclear. C-Span is likely to carry some or all of it, but other television coverage may be limited, and the two nights conflict with the National Football League's first games.
This gathering is very different from the three the Democrats held between 1974 and 1982. The first was mandated by the party's 1972 convention to approve the party's first written charter, and the third was designed to provide a platform to challenge the Reagan administration's policies in the 1982 mid-term elections.
The only one that attracted controversy was the one held in Memphis after the 1978 mid-terms. Despite the Carter administration's best efforts to use it to stress its achievements — as the GOP is doing in Dallas — it wound up showcasing the internal divisions that had persisted throughout his presidency over the calls by party liberals for more domestic spending and, especially, national health insurance.
Seeking to minimize attention on the most contentious issue, the health policy panel was scheduled for late Saturday afternoon. But that gambit failed when Kennedy ignited the attendees with a ringing demand for prompt action on the issue, attracting far more attention than anything else that weekend.
"Sometimes a party must sail against the wind," the Massachusetts Democrat said. "We cannot afford to drift or lie at anchor. We cannot heed those who say it is time to furl the sail." And he vowed to fight "as long as I have a vote in the United States Senate" for "decent health care across the country … for all Americans as a matter of right and not of privilege."
Party leaders rejected a liberal challenge to Carter's budget priorities and papered over the health care split by passing a resolution calling for enactment of national health insurance within two years, a vow not kept until Barack Obama's administration enacted the Affordable Care Act more than 30 years later.
In an amusing twist of scheduling, the GOP gathering will be preceded into the American Airlines Center by the Barnum & Bailey circus.
Republican officials seem confident they won't be staging one of their own.
Carl P. LeubsdorfThe Dallas Morning News (TNS)
Carl P. Leubsdorf is the former Washington bureau chief of the Dallas Morning News.
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