Republican Party insiders are hitting the panic button, now having to pour millions into midterm races they once considered safe, including deep red states.
President Donald Trump and his policies have cast what one official described as an inescapable, plague-like cloud over the map, according to Politico, with one senior GOP official lamenting, "We need to stop the contagion."
New waves of big spending, visits from administration officials and anxious private conversations among top party operatives reveal a GOP scrambling to defend red seats and states Trump won handily in 2024. Since Aug. 1, more than $110 million in GOP ad money has poured into districts Trump carried by double digits, and nearly two-thirds of all House ad spending has gone toward "propping up Republican incumbents," per an AdImpact analysis.
According to the report, GOP leaders are still fighting to hold Iowa and Kansas, while quietly deprioritizing Georgia and North Carolina, which a growing number of Republicans privately expect to flip. Alaska and Texas remain worries too, and Ohio's outlook has worsened amid soaring diesel prices and tariff backlash — the same forces battering Texas, Iowa, Michigan and Kansas.
"The map is hilariously big right now," one national GOP pollster grimly joked.
Michigan looms especially large, where Mike Rogers is fending off progressive Abdul El-Sayed in a marquee Senate race shadowed by tariff pain. "Everywhere we go, we are getting hammered on it," one Michigan Republican told Politico. "It's crushing us."
Many operatives "doubt the bleeding stops" until voters see relief at the gas pump. "The question is: How much longer can we go?" one senior House Republican asked.
The anxiety tracks with reports of a GOP super PAC privately panicking over a red-state Senate seat it once considered safely locked up, and with House Republicans quietly shifting emergency cash into gerrymandered districts that were supposed to be untouchable this cycle.