DALLAS — Vice President JD Vance was billed as the headliner of the second night of the Republican convention, but President Donald Trump stole the show.

With a hug and a handshake, Vance exited stage right after his speech as Trump returned to the place he likes most — center stage — to make his final pitch of the convention to keep Republicans in power.

At one point Trump asked attendees to raise their right hands and pledge to him that he would vote with their family and friends. Dutifully, they did.

“You know what happens if you don’t vote?” Trump said. “You go to hell.”

The two-day rally in Dallas came as Trump’s approval has sagged below 40% and Republicans fear losing control of both the House and Senate. Republicans hoped the gathering would help energize a base beleaguered by high prices and the Iran war to turn out in droves. But the two days of red meat tossed from the stage seemed unlikely to satiate independent voters whose support has flagged.

Here are seven takeaways from the convention:

Vance Makes His 2026 (and 2028) Pitch.

Vance arrived in Dallas widely considered the front-runner in the 2028 Republican presidential primary. His speech offered some early clues about how he might approach a campaign.

Vance focused on restoring the primacy of the traditional nuclear American family, a theme he has championed in the administration. He did not mention the war in Iran, an operation he has defended publicly but raised concerns about privately. But he issued a plea for conservatives not to abandon the White House over policy.

“Do not throw the baby out with the bathwater,” he urged.

Vance speaks in a far more scripted political style than Trump. He caught fire with the crowd when he snapped back at a protester who interrupted his remarks by waving Palestinian and Mexican flags. “My friend, if you love Mexico so much, get your ass over there,” he said.

But he failed to sustain the kind of enthusiasm that Trump commanded either night. Nor did he win anything beyond perfunctory praise from the president, who quickly ushered him off the stage.

As the balloons fell, it was the president alone, along with a tenor singing. Trump is not giving up his crown quite yet.

Trump Throws an Affordability Hail Mary.

Trump has called affordability — a top buzzword for Democrats this year — a “hoax.” In his speech Wednesday night, the president claimed that prices are on their way down. At the same time, he rolled out an audacious plan to address people’s concerns about costs: a massive cash giveaway.

He branded his dubious and detail-free plan to send $5,000 to every American adult a “Trump Dividend.”

But Trump was virtually the only one talking about it.

A day later, the splashy $1 trillion-plus plan barely made a ripple on the convention stage.

The president’s own son, Donald Trump Jr., didn’t so much as mention it.

Neither did the speaker of the House.

Neither did the vice president.

Only Trump did.

If the president wants the dangled cash to be a major factor in the midterms, the rest of the Republican Party didn’t use the rest of the convention to sell it.

Republicans Have a New Rogues’ Gallery of Liberal Villains.

Forget about Nancy Pelosi.

In Dallas, Republicans made clear that the former House speaker has been dethroned from her decades-long position as the party’s favorite political villain.

Speaker after speaker assailed Hasan Piker, a leftist online streamer, and Abdul El-Sayed, the Democratic Senate nominee in Michigan, for pushing what they described as an extreme and anti-American agenda. Their images, including Piker’s naked torso, were broadcast on the jumbotron over the stadium. Even Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York, who is a frequent target of the right, got less airtime.

At one point, Speaker Mike Johnson outlined the new rogues’ gallery of liberals — “Hasan Piker and Bernie Sanders and AOC and Abdul El-Sayed and Zohran Mamdani” — while casting the rest of the Democratic Party as squishes who would succumb to them.

In their attacks on Piker and El-Sayed, several convention speakers embraced anti-Muslim rhetoric, including a promise popular among conservative activists to “ban Shariah law.”

“We must stand and defeat the Islamists,” Sen. Ted Cruz of Texas said in his speech.

GOP Frames the Election as Common Sense Versus Crazy.

Republicans know that Trump is unpopular. They are banking on making Democrats unpopular, too — or at least unappealing and unelectable.

Over and over, speakers cast Democrats as out of the mainstream, frequently calling them socialists, communists and even worse. At times they stretched the truth. Democratic socialists might have won a number of Democratic primary victories since 2024, but no serious figure in the party is promoting communism.

“You guys are going to trigger the commies,” Donald Trump Jr., the president’s son, said at one point as the crowd chanted “USA! USA! USA!”

Vance, in the closing of his speech, summed up the message so many had delivered before him over two days: “It’s about the party of common sense beating the party of the crazies.”

Texas Is a 2026 Battleground.

Six months ago, when it first emerged that Republicans were likely to pick Dallas for this convention, it was unclear whether Texas would wind up as a top midterm battleground.

It’s clear now.

A parade of speakers — from the president on down — used their precious time onstage to talk about Texas’ razor-close Senate race. They sought to boost Ken Paxton, the Texas attorney general (even as Trump mocked his sartorial choices on back-to-back nights), and tear down James Talarico, the Democratic nominee. On the eve of the convention, Trump’s super political action committee had reserved $10 million in ads to help Paxton.

“Tala-freako maybe tops the list,” Vance said of Trump’s nickname for Talarico.

But it wasn’t just the Senate race. Republicans gerrymandered the state in 2025 to create as many as five new safely Republican House seats. But Republicans running in several of those seats appeared at the convention, seeking a boost in regions that Trump won handily.

Was It Must-See TV? Early Signs Suggest No.

Trump has long been known as a master of the television audience. Not this time. An average of 2.5 million people tuned in to watch his Wednesday night speech on Fox News, one of the few major TV networks that aired the remarks in full, according to preliminary figures from Nielsen. That was an average primetime audience for the network, based on the most recent quarterly statistics, and below the usual viewership for programs at that time.

In other words, no Trump bump.

To be fair, the president’s programming faced some steep competition. The first game of the National Football League season was on at the same time as his speech. The season’s second game was on Thursday during Vance’s and Trump’s speeches.

Republicans Make Their Bid to Buck History.

Parties in power traditionally attempt to expand their appeal in midterm elections through targeted outreach to independent voters. That was not the strategy charted by Trump and his allies in Dallas.

Only a handful of speakers offered any kind of outreach to moderate voters (one of those exceptions was Rep. Mike Lawler of New York). Far more focused their remarks on stoking fears of Shariah, transgender athletes and Democratic candidates who were repeatedly described as communists. Again and again, Trump begged his supporters to “pretend” that he would be on the ballot — an attempt to get enough of them out to prevent the usual losses for the party in power.

Trump and his allies are staking their chances on their ability to drive their own voters to the polls. At the top of the list are Trump loyalists who typically skip midterm elections.

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This article originally appeared in The New York Times.

By Shane Goldmacher and Lisa Lerer/Ruth Fremson
c. 2026 The New York Times Company