In late September, top Republicans across House GOP leadership, leading political operations and individual campaigns received a trove of internal polling. It sparked a new level of panic.The polling didn’t just reveal a harsh environment for the party in power on par with typical midterms, but rather some close-to-catastrophic scenarios in a slew of formerly safe red seats across the country, according to three people with direct knowledge of the matter who were granted anonymity to discuss private information.Key seats in Kentucky, North Carolina, Nevada and other areas that President Donald Trump won by 10 points or more in 2024 were competitive. All three vulnerable GOP-held seats in Iowa looked doomed. And most ominously, a crop of Republican incumbents who haven’t had to run serious races in years were vulnerable, from Oklahoma to Wisconsin and beyond.Now, less than four weeks before Election Day, the concerns are running so deep and the atmosphere is so uncertain that Republicans are beginning to brace for some of the worst-case scenarios.”Polls aren’t looking good,” retiring Rep. Barry Loudermilk (R-Ga.) said in an interview. “But we’ve also seen in the past couple of cycles, polls are really hard to predict. I think there’s just a lot of things in play, and of course, what do we have three weeks out — that’s light years in political time.”One senior House Republican involved in the conversations added: “I think the scary part is we don’t know where the bottom is.” They, like others in this report, were granted anonymity to discuss the political climate honestly.Their worst fear — according to conversations with more than two dozen Republican lawmakers and senior operatives — is that white working class voters in some states who have become central to the GOP coalition won’t just stay home next month, but instead they’ll be so angry or disillusioned by high fuel prices and the war in Iran that enough of them will vote for Democrats.“The environment has a lot people scared to death,” said one GOP operative working on a red-leaning House race that is competitive.“Where is the surge in Dem votes coming from?” that operative asked. “Is it truly no turnout among white working class? It’s such an open question and we just don’t know the answer. It’s impossible.”Spokespeople for the National Republican Congressional Committee and the Republican National Committee brushed off the concerns.”Anonymous strategists who spend more time bed-wetting to media than working in the trenches to win races have no idea what they’re talking about,” RNC spokesperson Natalie Baldassarre said.NRCC spokesperson Mike Marinella agreed: “House Republicans have a more favorable map, a stronger ground game, a historic fundraising and spending advantages, and battle-tested incumbents while Democrats are stuck dragging their unelectable socialist nominees across the finish line.”Still, top Republicans’ travel schedule reveals the extent of their concerns: Johnson is heading to deep-red Kentucky on Friday for a fundraiser to boost Republican Ralph Alvarado in the 6th District, which Trump won by 15 points in 2024. Johnson and Trump are also both planning trips to Montana where Republicans are working to fend off a Democratic challenger in a district the president won by more than 11 points.“Speaker Johnson is leaving it all on the field and leaving no stone unturned as he campaigns in more than 40 districts and over 20 states in the month leading up to the election,” Johnson’s spokesperson Greg Steele said. And, pointing to Johnson’s record-setting third quarter funding, Steele added that: “Johnson is not slowing down and helping to get resources to every district that will decide the majority.”Trump is holding a rally in deep-red Tennessee on Saturday, in GOP Rep. Matt Van Epps’ district. That seat — which is still considered generally safe — and several others in the state have not been on Republicans’ radar at all, but the current drag of the war and other factors are just too big for them to be comfortable.“I’m worried about all three in the area,” one Tennessee Republican said of the red-leaning districts Democrats are targeting. “Too many unknowns.”Even as internal GOP data shows a series of troubles, Republicans argue the polls are overemphasizing Democrats’ advantage. “I think there’s no question there is some undersampling,” said one RNC official, granted anonymity to discuss internal deliberations.“I’m not surprised any of these are close. I’m not surprised that Democrats are trying to make it seem like we’re on defense everywhere,” they said. “These are never [races] that we assumed were overall slam dunks, but I very much like where we sit in all of them.”Still, the person added that RNC officials don’t have their “heads in the sand” about the challenges, even as they have a more optimistic view of the map.Loudermilk pointed to Republicans’ lack of cohesive messaging on high gas prices and other goods: “I don’t know if we’re doing a good enough job doing that.”“It’s not the best of environments,” Rep. Morgan Griffith (R-Va.) told reporters in late September, though he still maintained the GOP will keep House control. “I liked it a lot better when I first got elected in 2010, when the environment was much better for Republicans.”Top Republicans are most worried about staunching the bleeding in key Midwest districts. Senior Republicans believe their internal polling, if it holds, shows likely losses across all three at-risk GOP seats in Iowa: Reps. Zach Nunn and Mariannette Miller-Meeks and the race to replace now-Senate candidate Ashley Hinson, according to four people with direct knowledge of the private information.A White House official, granted anonymity to candidly discuss the races, said the “doom and gloom notion” among the Iowa seats isn’t a new phenomenon. “But I do think that they’re probably performing better than most think that they are. And I think that folks will be pleasantly surprised [when] we go into November 3.”But benchmarks they’re watching across the larger region are deteriorating as well. Wisconsin Rep. Bryan Steil, the House Administration chair, is in a tighter than comfortable race after winning by 11 points in 2024 — as is Rep. Brad Finstad across the border in Minnesota, who won his district by 12 points 2024.In Michigan, the party has a host of problems in battleground districts, but now feels that once-safer seat Republicans — like Bill Huizenga, who Johnson campaigned with Wednesday, and the race to replace Rep. John James, who is running for governor — are in jeopardy.Similarly, after top GOP outside groups cut bait on the blue-leaning Nebraska district held by retiring Rep. Don Bacon, Republicans in the state turned their attention to Rep. Mike Flood’s seat, which Trump carried by 12 points.One silver lining for Republicans in safer red seats is many are digging in now to shore up their races, and aren’t sleepwalking to November.The White House official said it’s Trump’s “coalition of voters” that Republicans need to turn out in the midterms, and “the president is on the road almost every night this month … communicating with those individuals.”But Democrats continue to stretch further into red territory while forecasting big wins.“We feel confident that we will get to 218,” Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee political director Brooke Butler said in an interview earlier this week, saying the party could win as many as 240 seats. “The question that I’ve told people from the beginning cycle is ‘How much?’”But while Democrats are increasingly bullish, they are navigating their own tough decisions because of Republicans’ massive cash advantage, leaving the GOP optimistic they can hold a few seats where Democrats don’t have the resources to compete. Top GOP House operatives remain confident about a number of core battleground districts — including where candidates have already put some distance between themselves and Trump.One national party operative remained hopeful that as Election Day nears, the races will get closer than polling currently suggests, as has been the case in past cycles. That would help them hold some of these redder seats that are competitive.Even as Republicans hope some red seats fall off the board as Election Day nears, many operatives told POLITICO they’re worried that outside groups will have to start siphoning resources into red areas to shore them up, moving important dollars out of the battlegrounds.“People that are in R+10 districts are showing [polling that] they’re tied and they’re saying, ‘I need help,’” said a GOP operative working on a battleground House race. “There’s real opportunity for Democrats in a lot of these.”Rep. French Hill, the chair of the Financial Services Committee from deep-red Arkansas whose opponent was just added to the DCCC’s “Red to Blue” list, said in a recent interview with POLITICO that he considers “the atmosphere a very tough political environment right now because of President [Donald] Trump’s lack of favorability at the top, and you know people are concerned about, as I say, what it’s like to live under an inflated economy the last four years.”Johnson, an eternal optimist, made clear during a campaign stop in Pennsylvania this week that he believes “this will be a close election.”He’s ramping up his warnings across the campaign trail of what Democrats winning power would mean: “They would try to impeach the president, of course, immediately …They’d spend every waking hour investigating the president, his family, and the cabinet, and leaders of business and industry. That would roil the markets. Just ask yourself, if you’re a hardworking family, how would that be for your family? That Democrats turned Congress into lawfare on steroids.”Samuel Benson contributed to this report.