"I think the Republicans are in much better shape than what a lot of these media polls are showing, and look, we still got a long way to go between now and Election Day," pollster Jim McLaughlin said.
Page A8From§Eachthe wee small hours edition — 31 August 2026
GOP trails in 8 Senate races two months out, plans hasty 'Trump-a-palooza' convention anyway.
As it ran on the front
Here's the timeline, laid out plain. Two months before the election, a polling aggregate has the GOP trailing in eight battleground Senate races. Eight. Not two, not three — eight seats where the numbers say the party is behind. And what does the party do with that information? It announces a convention. Not a strategy session. Not a course correction. A convention, described by the party's own people as 'very hasty,' branded 'Trump-a-palooza,' staged in Texas.
This reporter has watched enough of these to know what a party does when it's ahead: it goes quiet, it protects the lead, it doesn't want anybody looking too close. What a party does when it's behind by eight seats is throw a rally and call it a convention and hope the noise covers the number. That's not strategy, that's the oldest trick there is — if you can't win the argument, win the room. Fill it with signage, fill it with a nickname that sounds like a pay-per-view event, and let the cameras do what the polling can't.…
…(cont) Follow it further and it gets worse, not better. A 'very hasty' timeline means somebody looked at a calendar, looked at the numbers, and decided the safest move was speed — get the show up before anyone can ask why the show is happening at all. That is not the behavior of a party confident in its position. That's the behavior of a party trying to change the subject before the subject changes them.
And who pays for a convention like that? Not the eight races. Not the voters in those eight states wondering why their premiums are up, their kids' schools are underfunded, their wages haven't moved. The convention gets funded regardless of the polling. It gets funded whether the party is up eight or down eight, because the convention isn't a response to the numbers — it's a business that runs on its own calendar, with its own donors, who don't especially care what the aggregate says two months out.
That's the tell. When the actual scoreboard says you're losing and the internal calendar says throw a party anyway, the party was never counting on the scoreboard to begin with. It was counting on something else. This reporter has a pretty good idea what.
“Eight states down and the answer is a pep rally. That's not a plan, that's cover, and cover costs money that isn't showing up in anybody's paycheck.”
“The convention was scheduled months ago, the timing is coincidental, and 'hasty' just means efficient. Also the polling aggregate is one data point among many — did I say one data point? It's actually eight, in eight separate states, that's the whole point of an aggregate.”
The receipts
The Republican National Committee’s (RNC) first-of-its-kind midterm convention has been cloaked in mystery until a few weeks ago. Details are finally emerging about what’s expected to be a two-day pep rally to bolster hype and encourage…
This page is a back-issue: the story as it ran, receipts as they were. The current edition is at the front.