{"id":430203,"date":"2026-09-09T02:38:08","date_gmt":"2026-09-09T02:38:08","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/430203\/"},"modified":"2026-09-09T02:38:08","modified_gmt":"2026-09-09T02:38:08","slug":"energiser-or-circus-us-voters-weigh-in-on-trumps-midterm-convention-donald-trump-news","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/430203\/","title":{"rendered":"\u2018Energiser\u2019 or \u2018circus\u2019: US voters weigh in on Trump\u2019s midterm convention | Donald Trump News"},"content":{"rendered":"

Dallas, Texas \u2013 At a farmers market, 58-year-old Cody Johnson said he still believed in United States President Donald Trump\u2019s ability to energise voters.<\/p>\n

That belief serves as a cornerstone of the Republican National Committee\u2019s midterm convention, a first-of-its-kind event intended to mobilise voters ahead of the legislative elections in November, albeit in a particularly Trump-dominated fashion.<\/p>\n

Recommended Stories list of 3 itemsend of list<\/p>\n

Although the president, whose approval rating has dipped in recent months, will not be on the ballot, he has loomed large over the race.<\/p>\n

\u201cPeople will come from miles around [to see Trump],\u201d said Johnson, a Republican voter and rock quarry owner.<\/p>\n

He argued that the convention, hastily announced by Trump in June, could provide the bump needed to ward off a liberal surge in Texas, led by Democratic Senate candidate James Talarico<\/a>, and maintain the decades-long conservative hold on statewide office.<\/p>\n

\u201cTexas is leaning purple,\u201d he said. \u201cThis will definitely help\u2026 Trump can energise a voter\u201d.<\/p>\n

\"TexasTexas Attorney General and US Senate candidate Ken Paxton prepares on the stage of the American Airlines Center ahead of the Republican National Committee (RNC) midterm convention in Dallas, Texas [AFP]<\/p>\n

Walking her dog in a park in downtown Dallas, Shania Spears, who described herself as a policy-over-party voter, took a different view.<\/p>\n

The 29-year-old marketing specialist for a tech company wondered how the convention would effectively address state voters\u2019 growing discontent with Republican Governor Greg Abbott\u2019s leadership and Trump\u2019s second term.<\/p>\n

How could the event help alleviate the array of issues Texas residents continue to grapple with, she asked, most notably the stubbornly high cost of groceries and gas?<\/p>\n

\u201cIt\u2019s just entertainment,\u201d Spears concluded. \u201cIt\u2019s like a circus\u201d.<\/p>\n

The midterm front line?<\/p>\n

Texas has emerged as a front line in the November 3 midterm vote, with the convention only solidifying its outsized significance.<\/p>\n

The Lone Star State has long been held up as an emblem of the \u201cred state model\u201d, defined by a low-tax, low-regulation economic model and socially conservative policies, according to J Matthew Wilson, a political science professor at Southern Methodist University in the suburbs of Dallas.<\/p>\n

The state\u2019s three branches of government, the Senate, House of Representatives, and Governor\u2019s office, have been controlled by Republicans for three decades. A Democrat has not won statewide office since 1994.<\/p>\n

\u201cTexas looms very large in the Republican imagination as a kind of exemplar state for Republican policies,\u201d said Wilson, adding that it is home to an outsized number of major Republican donors and was also the \u201cepicentre\u201d of a shift in Latino support for Trump<\/a> in 2024.<\/p>\n

\"ShaniaShania Spears says she is unsure what the convention in Dallas will achieve [Joseph Stepansky\/Al Jazeera]<\/p>\n

To be sure, he said, Trump will find a warm reception from his base in Texas, but the location also underscores the state\u2019s increasingly precarious position for Republicans.<\/p>\n

Polls have consistently suggested that Democrat Talarico is leading or tied in the race for the US Senate with Republican Ken Paxton, the state\u2019s attorney general. Trump\u2019s decision to endorse<\/a> the scandal-ridden Paxton in the state\u2019s Republican primary over incumbent Senator John Cornyn has added a distinctly personal element to the race.<\/p>\n

Meanwhile, Governor Abbott, a close Trump ally, faces an upstart challenge from Democratic state Representative Gina Hinojosa, while three US House districts along the US border, including two currently held by Republicans, are considered toss-ups in November.<\/p>\n

Speaking to Al Jazeera, Griffin Blackburn, a 41-year-old bartender from Dallas and a Democratic voter, saw the decision to hold the convention in Dallas as a sign of growing concern over liberal backlash.<\/p>\n

\u201cHonestly, I think this thing just kind of shows how scared and intimidated they are,\u201d he told Al Jazeera. \u201cAnd how people are feeling towards the GOP\u201d.<\/p>\n

A referendum?<\/p>\n

On the policy front, Texas has adopted many of Trump\u2019s most aggressive agenda items, in what some advocates say offers a preview of the president\u2019s vision for the country.<\/p>\n

\u201cSomething that you\u2019ll hear\u2026 is that Texas is kind of a testing ground, or pilot space for these policies,\u201d Javier Hidalgo, the public affairs director at RAICES Texas, an immigration advocacy group, told Al Jazeera.<\/p>\n

He pointed to the Abbott government\u2019s pressure on local jurisdictions to deputise local police to conduct federal immigration enforcement actions, under so-called 287(g) agreements. The campaign predated Trump\u2019s efforts to leverage federal funding to states to gain immigration and voting concessions.<\/p>\n

Texas has also passed laws in recent years requiring jurisdictions to coordinate with federal immigration agents and allowing local police to stop individuals<\/a> on suspicion of entering the country without documents, a policy that rights groups charge codifies racial profiling.<\/p>\n

\"CodyCody Johnson (right) is confident Trump will energise voters in Texas [Joseph Stepansky\/Al Jazeera]<\/p>\n

On voting rights, Texas has long imposed heightened restrictions on voter identification and mail-in voting. The Brennan Center for Justice has linked a 2021 law that added further restrictions to mail-in voting to disproportionate ballot rejections for Latino, Asian and Black voters.<\/p>\n

Texas was also the first state to heed Trump\u2019s call to conduct rare, mid-decade redistricting, redrawing the state congressional map to potentially create five more Republican-held seats.<\/p>\n

The National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) has decried the move, which has been upheld by the US Supreme Court, as \u201cunconstitutional racial gerrymandering\u201d.<\/p>\n

While Hidalgo cautioned against viewing the popularity of a candidate like Talarico as a referendum on any single issue, he said it may reflect broader pushback in the state.<\/p>\n

\u201cVoters are going to look at the candidates and see who\u2019s less likely to cause more harm,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n

A Trump-first affair<\/p>\n

How much harm Trump may cause the Republican Party in the final stretch of the midterms remains a subject of debate.<\/p>\n

With his approval rating dropping as much as 20 points since January last year, according to some polls, and his unpopular war on Iran dragging on with no end in sight, the president threatens to be an albatross for some Republican candidates in competitive districts.<\/p>\n

But the Texas convention underscores that distance is not an option, according to Mark Jones, a political science fellow at the Baker Institute for Public Policy in Houston.<\/p>\n

\u201cNormally in a midterm with an unpopular president, candidates from the party in power who are in competitive districts tend to try to distance themselves from the president,\u201d Jones said.<\/p>\n

\u201cBut with Donald Trump, that\u2019s not possible. Especially in his second term, he\u2019s become inextricably linked to the Republican Party and the Republican brand.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cI think Republicans nationwide, and especially here in Texas, have decided that their best strategy is to embrace the president and hope that he can mobilise his voters from 2024 to turn out and vote in a midterm election where he\u2019s not on the ballot and in which they normally do not turn out to vote,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n

Tucking into a Vietnamese rice dish in a food court in central Dallas, 54-year-old Pat Ferguson had little faith that an unorthodox midterm convention, particularly one focused on the administration\u2019s claimed victories, would inspire voters.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe convention isn\u2019t impacting the things that are going to sway them,\u201d said Ferguson, a Navy and Army veteran who said he has voted both Republican and Democrat throughout his life.<\/p>\n

\u201cPeople vote with their wallets. They\u2019re feeling the impact of the high oil prices,\u201d he added. \u201cThey\u2019re feeling the impact of the tariffs, tangentially or directly.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cThat\u2019s how Democrats gave it away [in the 2024 election],\u201d Ferguson said. \u201cIt\u2019s just hard for Republicans to say, \u2018Everything\u2019s great. This is exactly how it should be\u2019.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Dallas, Texas \u2013 At a farmers market, 58-year-old Cody Johnson said he still believed in United States President…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":430204,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[145,223,27,29,28,464,7454,100172],"class_list":["post-430203","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-texas","tag-donald-trump","tag-news","tag-texas","tag-texas-headlines","tag-texas-news","tag-united-states","tag-us-canada","tag-us-midterm-elections-2026"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/430203","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=430203"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/430203\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/430204"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=430203"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=430203"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=430203"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}