Donald Trump's upcoming Houston-area rally is like Coachella for Texas GOP candidates

When Donald Trump takes the stage in Conroe on Saturday, he’s almost guaranteed to continue talking about rigged elections, Joe Biden’s failings and the prospects of running again for president in 2024. But the rally — his first full-fledged MAGA event in Texas since 2019 — means far more to GOP strategists. For them, it’s a gold mine of political organizing. For hours, they will have a captive audience of Trump loyalists who can be enticed into volunteering on other campaigns, added to donor lists and introduced to other Republicans running for office who will get time to speak at the event. “There’s so much more to it than just the speech,” said Christian Ziegler, vice chairman of the Florida Republican Party who attended Trump’s last rally in Arizona two weeks ago.

They are music festival-like events that run all day, with parking lots opening early in the morning for tailgating. When the gates open at the Montgomery County Fairgrounds at 2 p.m, thousands of diehard Trump fans will already be filing in to hear hours of what could be considered pre-game speeches, buy merchandise and listen to classic rock songs blaring from the sound system until Trump takes the microphone around 7 p.m. Ziegler said when Trump had a rally last summer in Sarasota, Florida, the GOP had dozens of workers combing the fairgrounds before he spoke to sign up voters and recruit more volunteers. He said the same thing was happening in Florence, Arizona at the Jan. 15 rally. He said it can be hard to re-engage the GOP base and get them organized, especially between the general election and the midterm. But a Trump rally gives state and local candidates a chance to re-activate those voters early for the midterms, when turnout typically dips. “It fills a void in the downtime between election cycles,” Ziegler said. In Arizona, the crowd heard over an hour of speeches from state and local candidates running in primaries before Trump stepped onstage. Later, Trump gave shoutouts to many of those same candidates from the podium — a major boon for GOP candidates in primaries.