Republicans are trying something unusual this cycle: a full-scale convention in a midterm year, staged in Dallas and featuring President Trump to fire up the base ahead of what both sides agree will be an unusually consequential election. Democrats have decided to crash it. Whether that’s a shrewd play or an unforced error depends entirely on what they show up and say — and the early signs suggest they haven’t thought it through.
The plan, per reporting in The Hill, has two tracks. More than a dozen left-wing organizations intend to rally in downtown Dallas to pull attention away from the convention, and Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries is dispatching a four-member House delegation to “underscore the contrast between the two parties.” One Texas Democratic operative was almost giddy about the opportunity, saying he was glad Republicans were coming and hoped the event got as much airtime as possible.
“I don’t know who we have to pay to thank the Republicans for doing this at this time, but I’m happy they’re coming. I hope it gets as much airtime as possible,” said Matt Angle, founder of the Lone Star Project, a Texas-based Democratic PAC. “It gives Democrats another event to organize around and another opportunity to make the case in a convincing way.”
Here’s the problem with his enthusiasm: The contrast he and Jeffries want to draw is only a winner if the Democratic Party currently on offer is one that plays in Texas — and it isn’t. A delegation arriving to spotlight the difference between the parties will be doing so at the precise moment the national conversation is fixated on the DSA’s rising influence over the Democratic ranks, on candidates who’ve flirted with open borders, and on a trans cultural agenda that polls badly across the Sun Belt. If you’re underwater on exactly the issues the cameras will be trained on, more airtime isn’t leverage. It’s exposure.
The individual counterprogramming is where it gets genuinely puzzling. Texas Senate candidate James Talarico plans to answer the convention with a statewide “Love Thy Neighbor” food drive. There is nothing wrong with a food drive. But as a piece of political strategy it’s close to inert. A food drive mostly reaches and mobilizes voters already inclined to vote Democratic; it does nothing to pry loose the persuadable Texans a challenger actually needs to beat a statewide Republican. It’s an event designed to feel virtuous rather than to move a single vote that wasn’t already moving.
The counterprogramming instinct isn’t crazy on its face. A rival party staging a splashy event in your state is a real opportunity, and refusing to respond would look passive. Democrats are right that a contrast can be drawn. The trouble is…the contrast. Men in girls’ sports, open borders, ditching oil and gas for wind and solar, repealing tax cuts (including taxes on tips and OT), opposing Trump on his cuts to prescription drug prices, embracing anti-Semitism and Nazi tattoos are not even close to being policy winners in red Texas.
A midterm convention is a bet by Republicans that energizing the base is worth the spectacle. Democrats are free to answer it, but if the answer is a protest crowd heavy on the party’s least electable elements and a candidate handing out canned goods, the contrast voters absorb won’t be the one Jeffries intends. Sometimes the smartest counterprogramming is to let the other side have its week — and to not remind a once-reliable swing state exactly why voters there stopped supporting you.
