Republicans hope to flip history with midterm convention

DALLAS, Texas (KTRK) -- The Republican midterm national convention kicks off Tuesday night in Dallas.

It is the first GOP midterm convention and is an effort for Republicans to flip the script on history and hold or increase their leads in the House and Senate.

Theodore Roosevelt, the 26th President of the United States, gave a speech in 1910 about citizenship. He spoke poetically about activism and "the man in the arena". The man in this arena, in Dallas, 116 years later, is the 45th and 47th President, Donald Trump. He is not on the ballot this fall, but if the photographs that line the halls of American Airlines Center are any indication, this convention is about him.

"This has no platform," Cal Jillson, a political science professor at Southern Methodist University in Dallas, said. "Nobody is being nominated. So it's really more a rally. It's a two-day series of speeches and political policy, breakout sessions, interspersed with a little bit of entertainment."

This is the first national convention in Texas since the GOP hosted in Houston in 1992. Before that, Dallas hosted in 1984.

Texas Southern University political science professor Carroll Robinson said he thinks the two-day event will help Republicans nationally, and he would have liked to have seen Democrats do the same.

"Generally, I think midterm conventions are a good thing," Robinson told ABC13. "If you represent people, you can't be afraid of interacting with them, and Democrats until the 1980s had midterm conventions."

Democrats are here in Dallas. They're hoping to counter the Republican message that they are the party of the working class and the ones who can fix the economy.

"By the time it's over, they'll be back in DC in their fancy suits before the queso hits the table," Texas Democratic Party Chair Kendall Scudder said. "They don't really care about us. Not one day do they get up out of bed thinking about how to make our lives better, and Texans know that."

The arena holds as many as 20,000 people. Republicans are hoping to fill it, and SMU's Jillson said he thinks they will.

"I think it will be packed and that's why they're giving away free tickets," he said, "so people locally can come if they want to. I'll be watching the second day to see if enthusiasm is maintained throughout a two-day series of speeches or whether people's attention drifts."

Roosevelt's speech that mentioned the man in the arena was called "Citizenship in a Republic," and in it he also offered these words that apply to those who don't involve themselves on one side of the debate or the other: "Criticism is necessary and useful; it is often indispensable; but it can never take the place of action."