The Brief

When Thomas Pace, director of facilities at San Bernardino City Unified, thinks about all the construction that needs to happen at the schools in his district, he struggles to get the math to work.

Many of the existing kindergarten classrooms don’t meet state standards, and now, they’re preparing to layer in another grade for young children: transitional kindergarten.

In 2021, California embarked on a $2.7 billion plan to offer TK to all 4-year-olds by the 2025-2026 school year in what’s poised to be the largest free preschool program in the country.

But school districts across the state, like Pace’s, are struggling to build or modify the facilities most appropriate for these new young learners.

Why the rollout is expensive and hard

San Bernardino City Unified is at the tail end of using $250 million in bond money the city raised over a decade ago for school improvements.

“All of the specialized space is highly expensive, and for those school districts that lack the local resources, we struggle to make those improvements on a grand scale,” Pace said. “So we were already struggling to catch up even in the kinder realm. Now you add in a greater offering for TK, it just puts a larger burden on local school districts.”

State requirements for new TK classrooms (and kindergarten classrooms) are different than those of typical classrooms. Four-year-olds can’t just sit at desks all day. They also need space to play, indoors and outdoors. They also need supervision when going to the bathroom, which means having a restroom inside the classroom, or close by.

In San Bernardino, 150 of the 190 early education classrooms don’t meet those standards, Pace said.

An initial analysis of state data by the Learning Policy Institute, yet to be published, found most districts reported having classroom space for early learners, but a third expressed concerns about adequate facilities, including square footage, bathrooms, and outdoor play areas.

In 2022, California expanded a grant program to help school districts build or renovate TK classrooms. Through two rounds of funding, the state has given out $585.9 million dollars.

But that program requires school districts to be able to provide matching funds at the local level. And districts have asserted that the way funding is structured makes it harder for lower-resourced districts to get money.

“We have lots of classrooms that need to be modified,” Pace said. “We lack the local funding source to match, and we lack the state funding for it. So if the governor doesn't continue to fund TK improvements to facilities, we are going to struggle.”

Last month, the governor in his May revised budget cut more than half a billion dollars for that program. Lawmakers are weighing putting a statewide bond on the ballot in November.

A spokesperson for the Department of General Services said in its last filing round, $1.04 billion worth of requests were not funded.

Why learning environments matter

Children gather around on a large colorful rug in the center of a TK classroom at Will Rogers Elementary in Santa Monica. The classroom has a wooden toddler play loft, puppets and toys, and tiny-sized furniture for 4-year-olds. But it’s only about 900 square feet and doesn’t have a restroom inside.

Space is important for young children, because they learn through play, said Susan Samarge-Powell, director of early learning at Santa Monica-Malibu Unified School District.

“So rather than students sitting at a desk all day long, that's not what our early learning environments are about. It's about moving around, they're moving all day long. And so having that space to afford them that ability is a big deal,” she said.

She said restrooms are also a big deal because 4-year-olds don't have quite the same bladder control as older kids.

The construction site of a new building and field at Will Rogers Elementary School.

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The construction site of a new building and field at Will Rogers Elementary School.

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"When you have little bodies, they have to go to the bathroom often. With the older kids, we can say, we're going before recess. But with littles, whenever they're ready, you have to go. So, it's a challenge," she said.

Across the other side of the elementary school, construction is underway to build new early learning classrooms that offer students an ideal environment — with their own play yard and their own bathrooms. District officials hope it’ll be ready by summer of 2025, but the district won’t be finished with most of its other TK construction until 2026 or 2027, said Carey Upton, the district’s chief operations officer.

“We’re playing catchup, and I think all school districts are,” Upton said. But Upton added his district, which includes Malibu, has the benefit of high-assessed property values and bond measures that tend to pass.

“It works OK for school districts that have funding. It works really poorly for school districts that don't, who don't have the money to front the costs,” Upton said.

Should the state wait to expand TK?

When state lawmakers announced the expansion of TK in 2021, officials said it would provide “high quality learning opportunities” for every child.

But Sara Hinkley, a program manager for the University of California, Berkeley’s Center for Cities + Schools, says quality may look different based on ZIP code.

Dr. Susan Samarge-Powell, Director of Child Development Services at Santa Monica-Malibu Unified School District.

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Carey Upton, Chief Operations Officer of the Santa Monica-Malibu Unified School District.

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“If you see that as being very uneven, then the idea of TK being a way to make up the difference between kids who have access to nice, expensive preschool experiences and kids whose families can't afford to send them to those kinds of experiences — we've kind of missed the entire goal of the expanded program, and that would be a shame,” Hinkley said.

“I think what we'll also end up seeing is that local districts that can raise money locally, that can issue voter-approved general obligation bonds to retrofit these facilities, will have better educational environments for their very young kids,” she said.

LAist reached out to Assemblymember Kevin McCarty, who authored the expansion of transitional kindergarten. His office said he was unable to comment.

Dale Farran, professor emeritus at Vanderbilt University, said the state should wait to implement TK until schools have the appropriate spaces for it.

Farran worked on a 2022 study in Tennessee that found that students who went to Tennessee’s public pre-K program had more behavior problems and lower test scores.

“[Kids] need to be up, they need to be exploring, they need to be interacting with each other and with the teacher, and they need to have an environment that facilitates all of that happening,” she said.

The garden at Will Rogers Elementary School where students can have classes to maintain it.

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When bathrooms aren’t in the classroom for instance, or their lunch is in the cafeteria with older students, it leads to more “transition” time, she explained — kids having to line up to go to the bathroom, or walk down the hall. Not only does that lead to less learning time, it leads to teachers having to exert more behavioral control on kids, she said.

“There's a lot of just waiting. And what happens with 4-year-olds and 5-year-olds is they get fidgety during all that wait time, right? And they may even start talking to a friend. And that leads teachers then to start what we call ‘behavior disapproval.’ Like, ‘put a bubble in your mouth,’ or ‘I told you no talking in the hall,’” she said. “And so children are hearing a lot more no's than they are hearing yes's. And that's also not good for children.”

If not done right, she said: “It will solidify the inequity at an earlier age.”

How does the state help besides money?

The California Department of Education says there are ways to make classrooms best suited for children, beyond the actual building. It’s advising local school districts on best practices — on how to arrange child-sized furniture and make classrooms appropriate for 4-year-olds. The department also has a toolkit on helping kids go to the bathroom.

When bathrooms aren't inside the classroom, teachers work with aides and other support staff to make sure they're taking kids to the restrooms in teams and developmentally appropriate ways, said Sarah Neville-Morgan, deputy superintendent at CDE.

“I think it goes far beyond what the school looks like now,” she said.

One of the TK classes at Will Rogers Elementary School working on a project.

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A study by the American Institutes for Research found children who attended TK in California had stronger literacy and math skills when entering kindergarten than kids who didn’t attend the program.

Neville-Morgan also pointed to touring Boston preschools, where, in one case, children had to go up a floor to use the restroom because they’re in an older building. “But their outcomes, their results from the Boston public schools, universal pre-K are phenomenal,” she said.

She said giving 4-year-olds access to transitional kindergarten will better set them up for success later in life.

“We're investing in [TK]... to give more children, those chances, those opportunities to later go out and have access to home ownership, to higher ed or for pathways that give them, not just a living wage, but a really good salary occupation,” she said.

What do districts without local funds do?

San Bernardino City Unified got some funding from the state grant program to help build an early learning center at the site of a high school, but that would be for just seven classrooms across a large district. Pace said the district didn’t apply for another round because they didn’t have enough local money to put up a match, which the state requires for the grants. There’s an exception for financial hardship, but that adds some limits on how money can be spent.

"That's the inequitable part about the system — if you have the money, you can turn in [the applications],” Pace said.

Fontana Unified School District applied for more than $23 million but hasn’t received any of it, and the district is in the process of putting up a bond in November. Leslie Barnes, an associate superintendent at Fontana Unified, said the district is looking to put TK classrooms in seven schools.

“The fact that they haven't slowed down the TK rollout, but yet aren't providing the funding we need to be available to provide that on our own,” Barnes said.

Alan Reising, business services administrator with Long Beach Unified and chair of the Coalition for Adequate School Housing, said districts will be forced to re-prioritize their local dollars.

“It was disappointing because there's such a demand out there for [the funding],” he said.

“Whether or not we are ready for them, students are coming,” Reising said. “And so we will do what we have done for decades, which is, we will make do with what we have.”

This story first appeared on Long Beach Post.

Long Beach will make a slew of parking tickets more expensive and charge higher cannabis taxes to avoid cutting library hours and some specialized police officers. The last-minute change, proposed hours before a City Council vote, reversed a controversial plan city leaders laid out in June to lay off nearly a dozen library employees to help balance its budget.

Facing a $58 million shortfall, the city will still lay off roughly 180 other employees and cut hundreds more vacant positions. But it will spare library staffing and hours, after the original budget — which would have cut Monday hours at five city libraries, the only ones open that day — prompted fierce public backlash.

Long Beach City Council members voted 7 to 2 on Tuesday for the revised $4-billion city budget.

Councilmember Cindy Allen, who objected, called the increased parking fines “predatory fees,” arguing that library funding shouldn’t come at the expense of unfairly targeting people already struggling financially. Allen represents a district that includes the densely populated Alamitos Beach and Rose Park neighborhoods, where parking is already scarce. “We don’t have driveways,” she said.

Kristina Duggan, who represents southeast Long Beach neighborhoods like Belmont Shore, also voted against the budget because it cut Fire Engine 14 near Colorado Lagoon, a move that’s expected to save $3.88 million but drive up response times.

Duggan and Allen both tried but failed to delay the budget vote, with Allen saying the changes were put together in a “slapdash manner” without a chance for the public to weigh in.

She warned her colleagues before the vote that if they approved the budget “without substantial discussion” then they were “complicit in rubber-stamping” a plan that would “affect people’s livelihoods.”

Under the plan, 18 categories of parking citations — including for blocking bike lanes, hydrants, double parking and crosswalks — will rise to a flat $100, up from $74 or $90, to generate $1.5 million. Street sweeping tickets would also get a $5 bump, to $80 — a difference that raises $700,000 in revenue.

In the last fiscal year, which ran Oct. 1 to Sept. 30, the city issued more than 100,000 parking citations and 201,000 street-sweeping tickets, Public Works Director Josh Hickman said. More than a fifth of street-sweeping tickets were written in Allen’s district, and more than half of all parking tickets citywide were issued in the first two council districts, which include downtown and Alamitos Beach.

John Edmond, a local lobbyist who sits on the board for the Library Foundation and spoke in support of the plan, said the $100 rates are on par with cities like San Francisco ($108), Oakland ($110), San Diego ($117). He argued this applies to the “most serious parking violations.”

“We can’t say we’re serious about pedestrian and bicycle safety without accountability,” he said.

The budget also raises the city’s cannabis retail tax from 7% to 8% and increases the cultivation tax to more than $15 per square foot, changes expected to bring in roughly $1.15 million.

The proposals came from Councilmember Joni Ricks-Oddie, who chairs the city’s Budget Oversight Committee. Ricks-Oddie said earlier Tuesday she had spent weeks preparing these and dozens of other recommendations in concert with city staff, continuously updating them to accommodate new requests that came in from the public and fellow council members.

“If we can’t do this … then we can’t fund the libraries,” Ricks-Oddie said in response to Allen’s concerns about pricier parking citations. “If we reject that, we’re saying no to our library hours on a Monday.”

The budget also sets aside $1 million for the city’s immigration legal defense fund, the Long Beach Justice Fund. That’s well short of the $2.2 million immigration attorneys and local immigrant rights groups say is needed to sustain it amid rising caseloads. Gina Amato Lough of Public Counsel’s Immigrants’ Rights Project said “the need has never been greater,” citing prolonged detentions, warrantless raids and difficulty accessing counsel.

Since Public Counsel’s $919,000, one-year contract to provide legal services began in November, the group has taken on more than 55 consultations and 46 full-scope cases through the Justice Fund.

After hearing repeated pleas for more money Tuesday, Allen proposed reallocating all the funding for Long Beach’s new Vibe City marketing campaign — which some have derided as a waste of money — to the Justice Fund. She was quickly shot down, with a representative from the City Attorney’s office saying they’re not sure that would be legal, considering the Vibe City campaign is funded by tax revenue earmarked for advertising and promoting the city.

City Council leaders called the budget cuts a necessary, if painful, step toward stabilizing Long Beach’s finances after years of instability papered over with one-time cash — a bet that higher fees now will spare deeper cuts later.

“It’s hard, and it’s personal for everyone, and it will be really difficult on families across this community,” said Councilmember Megan Kerr.

This story first appeared on The LA Local.

Colorful parade floats, charros on horseback and live music will take over Cesar E. Chavez Avenue on Sunday for the 80th East L.A. Mexican Independence Day Parade.

For decades, organizers have brought together community leaders, performers, businesses and organizations to celebrate culture, community and tradition. This year, the parade will culminate in a festival with family-friendly activations, including live music, local vendors and lucha libre. 

This year’s co-grand marshals are singer and actor Dasahev López Saavedra, better known as El Dasa, and Los Angeles County Supervisor Hilda Solis.

Here’s everything you need to know.

When is the parade and festival?

The parade runs from 10 a.m. to 1 p.m. on Sunday, Sept. 13. The festival takes place from 11 a.m. to 4 p.m. on First Street and Mednik Avenue. 

What’s the parade route? 

The 1.5-mile route will run along Cesar E. Chavez Avenue, starting at Mednik Avenue and ending on Gage Avenue. You can find a map of the parade route and other festivities on the festival’s webpage here. Early arrival is suggested to secure a viewing spot for the parade. 

A map of the East LA Mexican Independence Day Parade route.

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What streets will be closed?

• Mednik Avenue: Between 1st Street and Cesar E. Chavez from 5 p.m. Saturday, Sept. 12 to 9 p.m. Sunday, Sept. 13.
• Cesar E. Chavez Avenue: Between Vancouver Avenue and Gage Avenue from 6  a.m. to 3 p.m. Sunday, Sept. 13.

What can I expect at the festivities?

The parade will feature floats, show cars, representatives from Eastside organizations, equestrian teams, marching bands and folklórico dancers. 

The festival will include vendors, musical performances, resource booths, a pop-up from local boutique The Goddess Mercado, a free pet vaccination clinic that will administer free vaccines for the first 200 pets, and a free lucha libre showcase by East Los Lucha. 

Where can I park? 

Limited free parking will be available at the East L.A. Civic Center lot located on E. 3rd Street and Civic Center Way. Attendees can also find street parking in the surrounding area. 

Can I take public transit to the event? 

The Metro E Line’s East L.A. Civic Center station is just a short walk from the event. 

What if I don’t want to attend in person? 

If you’re unable to attend or want to watch the parade from home, you can tune in to the live broadcast on ABC7. 

For more information, check out the website here. 

This story first appeared on The LA Local.

Robbie Hall has a record of the people she has treated for overdoses at MacArthur Park.

The photos of many of the people she has treated are saved on her phone. She can scroll through them and remember each one.

Hall, an ambassador with the nonprofit Five Keys, has been doing this work for about four years and is at the park almost every day, carrying Naloxone, a medication used to reverse opioid overdoses.

She typically responds when someone stops breathing.

“I stopped counting when I got up in my 40s, because it started being gradually three of them, four of them,” Hall said. 

On a recent September morning at the park, Hall said she found a 14-year-old girl in a bathroom who was experiencing an overdose. Tears welled up as she talked about the people she encounters at the park.

“They need help, they need help,” she said. “This is every day.” 

She believes the city needs to address the problem. When asked about the plans to fence the park, she said she sees the fence as one way to improve the conditions she sees on the ground.

“They need to put something up here,” she said.

For Hall and others who work around the park, the fence is less a solution than a stopgap, something concrete to try amid problems that have proven harder to solve.

The Department of Recreation and Parks says the fence will be temporary and is still on track for construction this fall, but has not provided a specific date, cost estimate or explained what conditions would need to change before the fence comes down.

Marco Pacheco, president of the MacArthur Park Park Advisory Board, does not believe the fence will be temporary. 

“I think this is going to be permanent,” Pacheco said. “This is going to be a permanent fixture of some sort because first of all, you don’t put up a fence that costs millions of dollars to take it down. It doesn’t make any sense.”

Pacheco isn’t the only one who has doubts.

Richard Barron, who served on the Cultural Heritage Commission for 22 years before departing in July, also questioned whether the city would follow through on its promise to remove the fence.

“I doubt that the fence is going to come down,” Barron said, “especially when they’ve spent all that money. Even taking it down costs a lot of money, you know, and you’re going to throw all that material away?”

The Board of Recreation and Park Commissioners approved $2.3 million in funding for the project. The city has not said how much money will ultimately be spent on the fence.

Everyone has a different idea of what the fence will do

The city’s consultants have described a fence that would be transparent, reversible and designed to blend into the park.

Leila Hamroun, a senior preservation architect with Tetra Tech, the consulting firm working with the city on the project’s design, said the fence won’t be a dominant feature.

“The whole intent here is to guarantee that it just blends in, that it’s seamless,” Hamroun said. “It’s reversible, transparent, minimalist, consistent with the evolution of urban parks over time.”

A rendering shows the proposed green metal fence around MacArthur Park.

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The fence is expected to be about 8 feet tall, with gates at eight existing entrances. Decorative elements would be considered separately, with community input expected next year.

For Michelle Garcia, who has been a vendor around MacArthur Park since 2015, it could help distinguish vendors from the people living in the park.

“I support it if they could get the homeless people out,” Garcia said. “They are the ones that make MacArthur Park look bad. But they also make us look bad, because we sell around the area, so they think we’re like them, which we’re not.”

Garcia was among a group of vendors at MacArthur Park who held a Sept. 2 press conference to call attention to what they described as police harassment and citations that pushed vendors away from the park.

“Like us, we’re trying to work and get money for our bills, our rent,” she said.

Police have their own expectations for what a fenced park could accomplish.

The Los Angeles Police Department has stepped up enforcement around the park through a joint task force with the Drug Enforcement Administration focused on drug dealing in the area. In July, Rampart Division Capt. Benedict Fernandes said the operation had significantly disrupted the drug trade, but that drug users were spreading into surrounding neighborhoods in search of narcotics.

“We know that all the communities around have been impacted because it got spread this way, sort of like a shotgun blast,” he said. “It went south, it went east, it went north, it went west.”

Fernandes said the next phase of the enforcement effort would focus on connecting unhoused people and drug users with shelter and recovery services.

The fence, he said, is meant to make the park less convenient for drug activity and “prevent crime” inside the park.

“Because that’s the problem,” Fernandes said. “The Alvarado corridor at MacArthur Park has been convenient for drug users for years. We’re just trying to make those things stop.”

Fernandes said the temporary fence along Alvarado and now the orange bollards installed in the area, have worked to disrupt that activity. 

But Hall, the outreach worker administering Narcan at the park, has not seen those types of improvements on the ground.

“Since they did that big bust? No, it got worse,” Hall said when asked whether she had seen fewer overdoses in the area.

She said people wait for police to leave the park before returning.

“If it wasn’t for Five Keys, there would be a lot more dead bodies here,” she said.

Some residents say that adding a fence around MacArthur Park would change the makeup of the neighborhood. Others welcome a change to the troubled park.

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How the fence is supposed to work

The plan calls for the park to remain open during the day, with eight entry points, and close overnight from 10 p.m. to 6 a.m. LAPD would close the gates at night, and Recreation and Parks maintenance workers would reopen them each morning.

The department says the fence is intended to make the park easier to maintain. Illegal dumping, littering, vandalism and graffiti have made routine maintenance difficult, according to the department, which has said MacArthur Park generates more graffiti cleanup requests than nearby Lafayette Park.

The city has pointed to nearby Lafayette Park, which is fenced and closed at night, as a model for MacArthur Park.

Pacheco, the president of the park’s advisory board, said he has heard general support for the fence among community members. 

“In many cases, community members alluded to Lafayette Park having been fenced for a long time, the difference between the two parks, Lafayette being a lot safer and a lot cleaner and less of a problem than MacArthur Park,” he said. 

The fence still needs final approval from the five-person commission that approved the project’s conceptual phase in October. The commission has not yet set a date to consider the final plans.

To incentivize voters to cast ballots for Republicans, President Donald Trump used his convention speech to promise a dividend of $5,000 to every adult citizen if the Republican Party maintains control of Congress in the midterm election.  

"If the Republicans win, you win with us and you get $5,000," he said. "It will be called the Trump dividend, congratulations."

The money would have to be spent in the U.S., the president said. 

Trump did not provide details about where the money would come from or the legality of his promise. According to the most recent Census data, it could cost $1 trillion or more to provide these payments. 

The event is designed to rally support for Republicans in the midterms where they face an uphill battle to maintaining control of Congress. 

He said the midterms will decide if the country stumbles or surges forward, adding that he will travel to "every race," to show his support to the Republican nominees, and to Texas even more than once. 

Trump's support and his ask of voters to "pretend" that he's on the ballot could backfire given his unpopularity amid the war in Iran and the nationwide focus on affordability.

"Vote Republican and we will leave the world in our dust for generations to come," said Trump.

Apart from the $5,000 promise, Trump's address was not very different from his typical rally speech, touching on issues he often speaks about, including tariffs, the importance of destroying Iran's nuclear program, passing a bill to limit voter identification and registration rules and claiming lower inflation than when he took office. 

It was a night where Trump was the star of the show. The event, billed as a "Trumpapalooza," put the president center stage as Republican candidates, lawmakers and everyday Americans shared appreciation for Trump and his policies.

President Trump greets attendees as he walks on stage to speak on the first day of the 2026 Republican National Convention Sept. 9, 2026 in Dallas, Texas.

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"Let's hear it for the man who had the vision to hold this convention," Rep. Tom Emmer, R-Minn., said to widespread applause.

Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton, the Republican Senate nominee in Texas, also opened by praising President Trump for standing up for Texas.

Paxton addressed the economy, promising tax relief policies to help American families. He also made an appeal for more support, acknowledging that his opponent, state Rep. James Talarico has the money advantage.

"I need your prayers, your vote and your support," Paxton said. "If we lose Texas, we lose the common sense revolution. If we lose the common sense revolution, we lose America."

Texas Republican Senate candidate, Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton walks on stage on the first day of the 2026 Republican National Convention on Sept. 9, 2026 in Dallas, Texas.

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Rep. Brandon Gill, who represents a district north of Dallas, said this election is about "the mainstream versus the extreme."

Gill, one of the speakers with the longest address Wednesday, returned several times to transgender issues, a culture-war theme that has been especially prominent in Texas politics.

"I think we can all remember the good old days when political debates were about marginal tax rates and government spending," Gill quipped. "Now we are debating whether toddlers can become transgender, whether men can become pregnant and whether your daughter should have to share a locker room with a man."

Attorney General Todd Blanche spoke about the Trump administration's law enforcement agenda.

"President Trump will hold you accountable," he said. "If you choose violence, you will be held accountable. Now that is making America safe again."

Before Blanche, no sitting Attorney General had spoken at a political party convention, the House Judiciary Dems said on X Tuesday.

They called Blanche's participation in the convention "dumbfounding and unprecedented. Amazing how far the DOJ has fallen," said the post. 

Political parties typically hold big, televised presidential nominating conventions every four years, but this isn't a presidential election year. And midterm conventions just aren't a thing (at least not since Democrats scrapped them after a short run in 1982).

It would be reasonable to ask why Republicans, trying to hang onto their narrow majorities in the House and the Senate, would want to train so much attention on a president whose approval rating is underwater.

People hold signs on the first day of the 2026 Republican National Convention Sept. 9 in Dallas, Texas. President Donald Trump will headline the Republican National Committee's first-ever midterm convention Wednesday night.

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At a recent campaign rally, Trump laid out the theory of the case.

"The problem that we have is they say that Trump does great when he's on the ballot," said Trump, speaking in the third person. "But when he's not on the ballot, his people don't come and they don't vote.

"So, what I really want you to do is pretend please, that I am on the ballot," Trump said at the rally for South Carolina Republican Sen. Darline Graham, who is running for her seat this fall. "Just come and vote. It's so important."

But this isn't just a plea for Republican primary voters in a runoff election in a deep red state. In swing states and toss up districts, Trump and his advisors are trying to rebuild the coalition of voters who propelled him back into office in 2024, voters who don't always show up if there isn't a presidential race at the top of the ticket.

This is a different approach than that taken by most presidents whose parties are facing political headwinds in a midterm year. But President Trump has never been one to go along with the normal rules of politics.

Convention organizers say the gathering in Dallas will focus on the issues shaping the midterms, including lowering the cost of living and raising incomes, securing the border and protecting American values.

Based on an NPR analysis, using race ratings from the Cook Political Report, fewer than half of the Republican candidates in competitive House and Senate races are listed as convention speakers.

"We're going to be back in our district, working hard," said Republican Rep. Zach Nunn of Iowa, when quizzed on his convention plans by reporters on Capitol Hill.

He's in a toss-up race for reelection.

But if the White House is concerned about attendance, Vance isn't letting on.

"The president and I can go and make [the] argument on national TV," Vance said at a White House press briefing last week. "We don't need a congressman in a tight race to be there in all cases."

There's also a question of who will be watching. The convention is up against the NFL season opener on Wednesday night, a rematch of this year's Super Bowl between the Seattle Seahawks and the New England Patriots. There's a primetime football game on Thursday night as well.

Democrats aren't planning their own convention and the counterprogramming will be fairly limited.

"Most elected officials don't even want to go to [presidential nominating conventions]," said John Anzalone, a Democratic pollster and consultant. "I mean, the expiration date on conventions has passed a long, long time ago."

And, he argues, the war in Iran, unpopular tariffs, high gas prices and broader affordability concerns, mean the political environment "is disastrous for Republicans running for office and this Republican convention is not going to change that narrative one iota for the midterm elections."

Ohio Republican Party chairman Alex Triantafilou said he had no trouble finding people interested in attending. But the state party was also allotted far fewer tickets than it would get for a traditional presidential convention.

"From the very beginning we were told that we could use this as an opportunity to rally the troops and to raise some money for the party and those two things have certainly happened," said Triantafilou.

He said the state party is using the convention to excite grassroots Republicans and he hopes the president will visit Ohio again sometime before the November election.

"He is very popular here," said Triantafilou. "We do talk a lot about low propensity voters and turning them out. Nobody turns out low propensity voters in Ohio like the president. So, we welcome this."

Whether this novel midterms approach will pay off is yet to be seen, but some Republicans say it may be the best shot the party has to limit its losses in what is widely expected to be a tough year for Republicans.

"Running to President Trump and defending his record, I think, is an interesting strategy and I think it is so interesting that it might just work," said Terry Schilling, president of the American Principles Project, a Republican group. "We've tried running away from the president in previous midterms and we almost always lose."

Schilling will be at the convention and says he expects many of his friends involved in Republican politics to be there as well. He hopes they emerge energized and ready to drive a focused message heading into the midterms.

NPR's Eric McDaniel contributed reporting for this story.
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