Midterm conventions are a calculated risk.

Just ask any Democrat who remembers their party's 1978 gathering in Memphis, where a panel discussion on health-care policy laid bare the internal party split that led Sen. Edward Kennedy to challenge President Jimmy Carter's renomination two years later.

That kind of internal division probably won't occur when the Republicans hold their first ever midterm convention next week in Dallas. It's basically intended as a 12-hour Republican infomercial in which the Trump administration's tight control of the GOP will likely prevent any dissent--at least inside the hall.

The Republican Party's risk is just the opposite: too much control by the White House--producing endless, boring policy speeches--and too much glorification of an unpopular president who is likely to be a significant drag on its chances in November's midterm elections.

Recent polls show Trump's national job approval in the mid-30s with more opposition than support for specific policies. It's even down in Texas, which Trump easily carried three times and where the state GOP seems determined to make itself Trumpier than Trump.

The most recent survey by the University of Texas' nonpartisan Texas Politics Project shows........

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