The midterms are inside forty days now, and the numbers keep arriving like weather reports from a season the Republicans did not order. Poll after poll brings bad news for GOP candidates, even in seats that have been comfortably, sleepily red. The more interesting evidence, though, is behavioral — what Republican candidates are willing to say about Donald Trump, and what they are not.

As Vox’s Andrew Prokop has reported, some Republicans have begun, slowly and tentatively, to put small distances between themselves and the president and his least popular policies — the war in Iran, the mass deportations. After almost a decade of unquestioning fealty, the gestures are minor. They are gestures nonetheless.

In Florida, Representative María Elvira Salazar, who won with more than 60 percent of the vote in 2024, released an advertisement addressed directly to Trump, telling him that his immigration enforcement has “gone too far.”

In Iowa, a state hard-hit by soaring diesel prices, two Republican incumbents voted in favor of a resolution to end the Iran war.

Then there is the Senate map, which was supposed to be the hard part. Over the last two months, according to election forecasters like the Cook Political Report, race after race has slid into the tossup column or drifted left. The open Republican-held seats in Iowa and Texas are now rated tossups. Kansas, where Senator Roger Marshall is on the ballot, has moved from likely Republican to lean Republican. Even South Carolina has slipped out of the solid Republican column, though it remains an extreme long shot for Democrats. The drift does not run only one way: in New Hampshire, where the Democrat Jeanne Shaheen is retiring, the open seat has moved from lean Democratic to tossup.

Texas would be the prize. Polls there have consistently shown James Talarico, a Democratic state representative, leading Ken Paxton — the state’s scandal-plagued attorney general, who defeated the incumbent senator, John Cornyn, in the Republican primary.

Kansas is the surprise. The Democrat there, Adam Hamilton, is a megachurch pastor giving Marshall a genuinely tough race — a contest perhaps sharpened by what the New York Times reported earlier this month: that Marshall, a doctor, had sued hundreds of patients over medical debts, sometimes with the cases ending in their arrest.

One of those patients has since appeared in a Hamilton campaign ad.