The G.O.P. is still favored in the fall House races, but Trump and abortion are scrambling the picture in ways that distress Republican insiders.

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This article is part of our Midterms 2022 Daily Briefing

By Blake Hounshell

“I am not a member of any organized party,” the humorist Will Rogers famously once quipped. “I am a Democrat.”

Today, one might make the same joke about the Grand Old Party. Everywhere you look, Republicans seem to be squabbling with one another over the direction of the midterm elections.

One day, it might be Mitch McConnell, the top Republican in the Senate, complaining about the “quality” of his party’s candidates while his deputies point fingers at Senator Rick Scott of Florida, who runs the G.O.P.’s Senate campaign arm.

Another day, it might be Donald Trump calling for McConnell’s ouster and giving McConnell’s wife, Elaine Chao, bizarre nicknames like “Coco.”

On days that end in “y,” you might find Republicans on television complaining about Trump’s hold over the party, distancing themselves from his document-handling protocols and urging him to drop his obsession with the 2020 election, which establishment Republicans believe is unhelpful to their electoral chances at best and catastrophic to them at worst.

My colleague Luke Broadwater captured a litany of Republican complaints on the Sunday political shows, centering on He Whose Name Starts With T.

He noted: “Some are signaling concern that the referendum they anticipated on Mr. Biden — and the high inflation and gas prices that have bedeviled his administration — is being complicated by all-encompassing attention on the legal exposure of a different president: his predecessor, Donald J. Trump.”

What’s going on? It’s not so much that the underlying fundamentals of the midterm cycle have changed, although they have moved in Democrats’ favor somewhat. And it’s not so much that President Biden has suddenly grown popular, although his approval rating in public polls has ticked up a few notches in recent months. Nor is it that forecasters have begun downgrading Republicans’ chances of retaking the House — after all, The Cook Political Report still expects a G.O.P. majority next year.

Rather, what happened is what you might call a vibe shift among what the original insider tipsheet, The Note by ABC, used to call the “Gang of 500” — the motley collection of columnists, journalists and other political opinion-makers who haunt the green rooms in Washington and New York and collectively make up the “conventional wisdom.”

“We’ve gone from ‘Republicans will win every single election in the universe’ to ‘Republicans will not win a single election,’” said Corry Bliss, a Republican strategist who said he was confident in his party’s chances. “The pundits’ narrative has shifted overnight.”

The Biden Presidency

With midterm elections looming, here’s where President Biden stands.

Trump in the news

The F.B.I.’s search of Mar-a-Lago probably has something to do with it. Democrats had been struggling to make Trump the prime villain in their election narrative — remember what happened in Virginia last year? — and he made it easy by bursting back into the news.

But, as I wrote last week, there are reasons to think that the conventional wisdom on control of the Senate has outpaced the evidence. It looks like November will be a dogfight.

As for the House, see this CBS News poll released on Sunday. It suggests that the race for control is tightening — but there’s no indication yet that Democrats are favored to win.

Republicans would win 226 seats if the election were held today, CBS predicts. That’s down from the 230 seats the network was projecting in July, but it’s still a majority in a chamber where control hinges on 218 votes. And it shows Republicans as up two percentage points in the so-called generic ballot question, which asks voters which party they would choose to control the House were the election held today. Republicans are still up 0.8 points in the RealClearPolitics average.

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