With less than six weeks until the midterms, Republican Party panic has fully set in — and the finger-pointing is already underway before a single vote is counted, according to Politico Playbook.
GOP candidates and advisers are facing what amounts to an "electoral wildfire" in unlikely corners of the map, according to the report.
"The mood is very bad right now," a GOP operative working on multiple races told Playbook. "The polling is dropping like a rock, the map is expanding, and the knives are out among consultants. There is a world where we win everything if folks can turn it around and there is a world where this midterm is a historical blow out. People are very on edge."
Conservative radio host Steve Deace lit up GOP group chats with an X post warning Iowa Republicans that anyone in a +10 district is now "underwater," and that this cycle could shape up worse than the 2006 wave that crushed the GOP.
"If the environment is this bad in my home state, where Trump has been the most popular political figure over the last decade, I can't imagine where it is everywhere else," Deace warned.
Iowa's grim numbers capped a rough stretch in which Senate Republicans have been quietly deciding "where to invest" while "battleground candidates tried to distance themselves from President Donald Trump," Playbook reported.
That shift hasn't gone unnoticed. "He's had an incredible grip on the Republican Party, unlike any other president," Marc Short, former Vice President Mike Pence's chief of staff told Playbook. "What we are seeing now, when there is distance, it's intentional, and it's incredibly noteworthy."