Vice President JD Vance urged Republicans from several battleground states Thursday to “nationalize” their midterm races — pitching a two-part message of touting Republican accomplishments and branding Democrats as extreme, according to audio from a closed-door Dallas breakfast obtained by NBC News.

The remarks came ahead of Vance’s scheduled Thursday-night keynote at the Republican Party’s first midterm convention in Dallas, where President Donald Trump had spoken the night before for about an hour and 45 minutes. The breakfast included GOP leaders and activists from Michigan, Ohio, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin, NBC reported, citing a person who was in the room.

“We have two things that we’ve got to do in order to win these midterm elections,” Vance said, per the NBC audio. “Number one, we have to remind the American people of all the good things that we’re doing, and number two, we have to remind the American people of how effing crazy the Democrats have become over the past couple of years.”

He added: “We’ve got to nationalize this election. We’ve got to talk about all the crazy things the Democrats are doing.”

El-Sayed as national foil

Vance singled out Abdul El-Sayed, the Democratic Senate nominee in Michigan. With Michigan delegates in the room, he called El-Sayed a “nut job” and argued the Michigan race could help Republicans elsewhere.

“I think Abdul El-Sayed may very well be the person who wins Republicans the midterms in November because he’s such a crazy person,” Vance said, according to NBC.

That line fits a broader GOP midterm playbook already visible at the Dallas convention: national committees and Trump-aligned outside groups have poured money into Michigan and cast El-Sayed as a face of the Democratic left — a strategy other outlets have tracked alongside the convention programming. Whether voters outside Michigan buy that framing is the open question the closed-door pitch is meant to answer.

6 a.m. call, then “kick their ass”

Vance, greeted with “JD! JD! JD!” chants, quipped about a pre-dawn call from Trump after only a few hours of sleep following the president’s long Wednesday-night speech.

“So I get a call at like 6 a.m.: ‘JD, are you awake?’ Yeah, I’m always awake after four hours of sleep on a Thursday or a Wednesday night or whatever the hell day it is,” Vance said, per NBC. He cast Trump as “pounding the pavement” on elections and “exactly what we need from every single person in this room.”

Speaking for about 12 minutes, Vance said he would not dictate local race strategy: “I’m not going to tell you how to run your races because you guys are all out there and you see the local environment much better than I possibly could as vice president. What I want to tell you is just keep fighting.”

He closed by saying he wanted Democrats “more reasonable and more rational,” then framed November as the lever: “And the only way to get the Democrats back to common sense is to kick their ass in November.”

Closed-door breakfast audio is campaign strategy, not legislation — a reminder that midterm “nationalization” is messaging discipline sold to activists, while voters still decide whether national brand fights outweigh local races. Vance still had his public convention speech still ahead Thursday night.

Sources