DALLAS — For the first time in the party's history, the Republican National Committee is holding a full-scale convention in a year with no presidential race on the ballot. The two-day gathering, set for Sept. 9–10 at the American Airlines Center in downtown Dallas, lands just five weeks before Texans can begin casting midterm ballots — turning the state's fast-shifting Hispanic electorate into an unofficial theme of the event.
Trump Calls It a "Truly Historic Event"
President Donald Trump broke the news himself over the summer in a Truth Social post, writing that the gathering had never been done before and "will be a truly Historic Event." RNC Chairman Joe Gruters has since taken to calling the event a "Trumpapalooza," built around promoting the administration's record on taxes and public safety heading into November, when Republicans will be defending narrow majorities in both chambers of Congress.
The party opened a public ticket lottery this month, and organizers now expect more than 20,000 attendees, including media — which would make it the largest Republican gathering of any kind in roughly a decade.
Holding any national convention outside a presidential year required a rule change. RNC members voted unanimously to amend the party's bylaws at their January winter meeting in Santa Barbara, California, opening the door for Gruters to call a special gathering whenever the party wants one.
The choice of Dallas carries its own symbolism. Republicans haven't held a national convention in the city since 1984, when the city was a GOP stronghold; today, Dallas leans solidly Democratic. Senate Majority Leader John Thune and House Speaker Mike Johnson are both expected to attend, and Sen. Ted Cruz welcomed the pick, saying, "I'm proud that Dallas will host the RNC Midterm Convention this September."
Texas Sits at the Center of the Midterm Fight
The state hosts one of the country's marquee Senate races this cycle. Attorney General Ken Paxton unseated four-term incumbent John Cornyn in a bruising May primary runoff after a last-minute Trump endorsement, and now faces Democratic state Rep. James Talarico in November. Several competitive U.S. House seats and a potential governor's race round out the ballot, and Texas' redrawn congressional maps route multiple contests directly through heavily Hispanic districts along the border and in South Texas.
That overlap is why the convention's calendar placement matters so much. Early, in-person voting for the November election begins Oct. 19 and runs through Oct. 30 — meaning Dallas effectively functions as the opening bell of the fall campaign.
Why Republicans Need the Hispanic Vote to Hold
Texas Republicans built their current advantage in Congress and the statehouse partly on 2024 gains with Hispanic voters, when Trump carried an estimated 55% of the state's Latino electorate. That coalition is now showing cracks. A bipartisan UnidosUS poll released in May found 67% of the state's Hispanic voters disapprove of the president's job performance, and one in five Hispanic Texans who backed him in 2024 said they wouldn't do it again. Cost of living topped the list of grievances at 46%, with immigration enforcement close behind at 36%. Separate national polling from Pew Research and Atlas Intel shows a similar slide in Trump's approval among Hispanic voters nationally.
That backdrop raises the stakes for whatever message Republicans build around Dallas. The party's newly redrawn maps assumed the 2024 rightward shift among Hispanic voters would hold in several South Texas and border districts — an assumption Democrats are now actively testing, betting that frustration over prices and immigration enforcement can pull some of those voters back.
An Unconfirmed Speaker Lineup — but Familiar Faces in Reserve
Neither the RNC nor the Republican Party of Texas had released an official speaker list as of this writing, so it's still unclear which Latino Republicans will get prime-time slots in Dallas. The party isn't short on Hispanic messengers to draw from, though. U.S. Rep. Monica De La Cruz represents an 81%-Hispanic South Texas district and has leaned into her win as proof of a durable GOP shift in the region — as she put it during her first campaign for the seat back in 2022, "this is just the start of the future of the Republican Party."
Elsewhere on the ballot, Republican Eric Flores is running in the border-anchored 34th District against Democratic incumbent Vicente Gonzalez, another race likely to draw national attention as Republicans try to hold seats their 2024 Hispanic gains helped make competitive.
The real test for the Dallas convention will be whether it produces anything beyond a show of force — a concrete economic or immigration message capable of slowing the erosion Republicans are already seeing in Hispanic-voter polling. With early voting opening barely five weeks after the final gavel, the party has a narrow window to convert convention energy into turnout across Texas' Hispanic-heavy battlegrounds.
