WASHINGTON — Just a few weeks out from Election Day, Republicans are pressing the panic button.

Candidates in states and districts President Donald Trump easily won are starting to attempt dramatic reinventions. Super PACs are pouring huge sums into safely red territory. But post-Labor Day polling increasingly favors Democrats, and consultants are worrying the party’s massive money advantage won’t save their candidates.

In short: The GOP is staring down a blue wave, with its control of both chambers of Congress at risk.

“You’ve got real momentum on the Democrat side, and if we don’t watch out, you know, everybody all of a sudden now is just awakened to the fact that we may lose in the midterm,” Sen. Jim Justice (R-W.Va.) told HuffPost.

The general dynamics of the midterm elections have been set for months: Voters are angry about Trump’s handling of the economy and the Iran war, believing he broke his promises on key issues and is more focused on legacy projects and self-enrichment than lowering prices. But it wasn’t clear how far into GOP-held territory that anger stretched, and whether well-funded Republican super PACs could offset it.

The answer to the first question is pretty far. Operatives in both parties now believe Senate races in Iowa and Kansas are in play, and the head of a major GOP polling firm warned on social media this week that members representing seats Trump won by as many as 15 points should poll their districts to make sure they are safe.

The money question is more complicated. The Republican financial advantage is massive, especially since Trump’s super PAC answered intra-party doubters by spending $138 million to boost vulnerable candidates. But some in the party are starting to doubt the messaging behind those ads is effective.

One Republican consultant, speaking on condition of anonymity to protect relationships, noted Texas Gov. Greg Abbott began deploying his substantial war chest against Democrat Gina Hinojosa, outspending her by a 10-to-1 margin over the past month. Yet polling averages have moved toward the Democrat, even if Abbott still leads.

“If money can’t turn some of these races around, things are going to get ugly,” the consultant said.

Similarly, Democratic candidates for governor in both Ohio and Nevada have been badly outspent by their GOP opponents to little apparent effect: $40 million in Republican spending in Nevada has led to a toss-up race, while $70 million in spending from Ohio Republican Vivek Ramaswamy has led to a race where Democrat Amy Acton has a narrow lead.

“It sort of feels like he’s trying to lose as badly as he can.”

Other GOP allies say the party needs to change its message. The American Principles Project, a social conservative group that has encouraged Republicans to run anti-transgender messaging in the past, put out a memo on Thursday suggesting ads on the topic “may not be sufficient.”

“Republicans must also make the case to families on what they plan to do to help improve their economic standing,” the group wrote, adding: “The Republican sales pitch to voters on the economy is at best unclear.”

A New York Times/Siena College poll released Tuesday capped off a slew of public polling showing a dire position for Republicans, with much of the blame aimed at Trump. Likely voters gave Democrats a 51% to 43% edge on the generic ballot for Congress and indicated they trusted the party out of power on the economy, immigration, foreign wars, healthcare and handling the deficit.

Just 36% of voters thought Trump was generally focused on the right issues, and only 32% said Trump made the right decision when attacking Iran earlier this year. A 49% plurality of voters said they would prefer to back a candidate who will check Trump, while just 26% said they would prefer to support a candidate who backs the president, with 21% saying it would not matter either way.

Internal Republican surveys have not been quite as grim, but officials acknowledge the situation has deteriorated since Labor Day, a traditional marker of when everyday voters begin tuning into politics. One Republican consultant working on a number of top races responded to a text-message question about recent polling with a single turd emoji.

The clearest sign of how toxic the environment is for Republicans is how many of them have dramatically changed their tune in recent days.

Rep. Ashley Hinson, the GOP candidate for Senate in Iowa, launched her campaign pledging to be Trump’s “strongest ally in the Senate.” On Tuesday, she released an ad touting her work with Democrats.

“It used to be that reaching across the aisle wasn’t just OK, it was expected,” Hinson says in the ad. “Some people in Washington forgot that. I never have.”

The ad came not long after a spate of polls showed state Rep. Josh Turek, the Democratic candidate in the race, opening up a small lead over her.

Hinson isn’t the only Republican downplaying the party’s brand. Another Republican, Rep. Maria Elvira Salazar, running in a majority-Latino red district in South Florida, is calling Trump out in a new ad this week.

“Mr. President, some of your immigration enforcement efforts have gone too far,” Salazar says in the ad, noting half of recent immigration detainees had no criminal records. “The same Hispanics who helped you get to the White House in 2024 feel betrayed today.”

Salazar had previously called for a “deportation army” to help Trump. She’s facing Democrat Eliott Rodriguez in a closer-than-expected race.

Republicans are also beginning to look at triaging races which may get out of reach. Leading party operatives have begun discussing cutting off support for Rep. Mike Collins, who is badly trailing Democratic Sen. Jon Ossoff in Georgia’s Senate race, according to a Republican source familiar with the discussions.

So far, cutting off other candidates is unlikely: Party operatives still believe North Carolina’s Senate race, where former Gov. Roy Cooper has a healthy lead over former Republican National Committee Chair Michael Whatley, could tighten. Whatley’s close ties to Trump also make it less likely the party will abandon his race, a second GOP source said.

Democrats, meanwhile, are pushing their advantages. Super PACs affiliated with the party have started airing ads backing Democratic candidates for Senate in the traditionally red states of Kansas and South Carolina, with party officials particularly high on Adam Hamilton, a pastor challenging Sen. Roger Marshall (R-Kan.)

Speaking to reporters outside the Capitol on Thursday, Sen. John Kennedy (R-La.), whose folksy loquaciousness has made him a sought-after surrogate for GOP candidates, said he planned to campaign for colleagues in Iowa, Nebraska and Kansas.

“If you told me six months ago I was gonna be having to spend my time in those three states, I wouldn’t have believed you. Those ought to be fat guy layups for us,” Kennedy said. “We’re going to win there, but the races are close.”

The president, meanwhile, has done everything he can to keep the focus on himself, including by hosting an unusual “midterm convention” last week so he could deliver prime-time speeches urging voters to pretend he’s on the ballot.

This week he said record gas prices are actually “a very inexpensive price to pay” for his unpopular war in the Middle East. He has said people who dislike data centers — which is most people — want to be “backwards and poor,” and has brushed off growing fears of rogue artificial intelligence programs as a hoax.

“It sort of feels like he’s trying to lose as badly as he can,” Sen. Chris Murphy (D-Conn.) told HuffPost. “I mean, if you put together a plan for what he would say down the closing stretch to guarantee a wave, he’s executing it pretty flawlessly.”

One of Republicans’ main strategies to counter the dire economic sentiment is to cast Democrats as radical socialists and even full-blown Communists. Sen. Rick Scott (R-Fla.), a former chair of the National Republican Senatorial Committee, suggested Republicans would have a “great” midterm election highlighting Democrats’ allegedly fringe views.

“Democrats have gone crazy. They’re all socialists,” Scott told HuffPost. “They want to destroy our economy, destroy our education system, let everybody out of prison, shut down the Senate. I mean, these people have gone crazy, and they want me murdered. Hasan Piker wants me personally murdered.”

(The streaming platform Twitch suspended Piker last year for saying, “If you cared about Medicare fraud or Medicaid fraud, you would kill Rick Scott.”)

Other Republicans are more open about what the polling shows. Justice said his party has done a “horrible” job of trumpeting its beneficial policies, such as the tax cuts enacted last year.

“You’ve got to be living in a cave to not see that Toby and Edith — I call the voters Toby and Edith — are out there, and they’re hurting,” Justice said. “They can’t hold their nose and go vote for the Democrats, but they can stay home, and that will be the big challenge.”

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