Let’s try something for a second. Pretend you’ve never seen a single poll this cycle. You don’t know what the generic ballot average is, you don’t know any polling averages in any Senate or governor’s race, and you don’t know what Trump’s job approval is. Forget about historical polling bias. And pretend you’ve never seen any hackish/wishcasting early voting analysis. And consider the following: — Republican and Democratic groups are spending most of their money in more than a half-dozen Senate races where Trump won by double-digit margins in 2024, including states like Kansas that haven’t elected a Democratic Senator since FDR was president. — Republican and Democratic groups are spending money defending dozens of House seats that Trump won by double-digit margins in 2024, including some where he won by over 20 points. — In the home stretch, Trump is campaigning in deep red states like Mississippi and South Carolina. — Republican statewide candidates (e.g., Rick Jackson in Georgia, Dan Patrick in Texas) are publicly begging rural voters to vote early because they are openly panicking about their relative turnout so far. — Trump instructed the Justice Department to sue to pre-emptively block the certification of the Senate results in Alaska if the Republican candidate loses. — Nearly all of Republicans’ closing message attacks are some form of trying to tie their very-clearly-not-socialist Democratic opponents to socialism, and/or trying to focus their race on trans issues instead of kitchen table issues (e.g., inflation/affordability). — Republican candidates running in deep red states and districts that Democrats could not imagine winning in their wildest dreams (e.g., Arkansas Senate, Wyoming House), are going on the offensive against their Democratic opponents down the stretch, because they aren’t quite sure where the bottom is going to be. — Republican candidates in double-digit Trump districts are quietly scrubbing all mentions of Trump from their campaign websites. — Latino candidates in deeply Latino areas that swung heavily toward Trump in 2024 (e.g., in South Texas and South Florida) are campaigning against Trump on ICE overreach — something that was never essentially unthinkable ~18 months ago. — Self-described moderate Democratic candidates running in Trump-double-digit states like Josh Turek in Iowa are running on things like price controls. — Qualitative race raters like Cook & Sabato’s Crystal Ball — who get access to tons of internal polling from both parties that never see the light of day — have been shifting their ratings of dozens of seats towards Democrats on a weekly basis in October. Add that all together — what does that signal to you about how both parties, and neutral outside observers, currently view the national environment?