Top Republicans are increasingly worried about private polling that paints a dire picture of the midterms — and it's not just the House they're afraid of losing, it's also the Senate.

Why it matters: President Trump has warned Republicans that losing their slim House majority could lead to a third impeachment. But a Democratic takeover of the Senate would be a political earthquake — and neuter his last two years in office.

Zoom in: For the first time, GOP strategists are telling Axios that losing the Senate — where Republicans have a 53-47 majority — is a distinct possibility, and that they'll have to fight harder than expected to keep control.

Operatives say they've reviewed polling that shows the GOP facing competitive Senate races not just in traditional battlegrounds such as Michigan, Maine and North Carolina, but also in conservative states like Alaska, Iowa and Ohio.

Top GOP strategists acknowledge that immigration and the economy — the two issues that drove Trump's win in 2024 — are now liabilities.

"A year ago, I would have told you we were almost guaranteed to win the Senate," one GOP operative who's reviewed internal polling told Axios. "Today, I would have to tell you it's far less certain."

I’ve written before about the deeply contested (and contestable) reinterpretation of federal immigration law that the Trump administration adopted last summer, under which any non-citizen who was never lawfully admitted to the United States is subject not just to arrest, but to mandatory detention with no opportunity for release on bond for the duration of their removal proceedings.

This argument, which applies even to those who have lived in the United States (lawfully)1 for decades; even to those who at one point had “Temporary Protected Status”; even to those who have an asylum application pending, is based on the analytically and linguistically flawed claim that such individuals are “arriving aliens” who are “seeking admission” to the United States. (As one district judge put it last August, “someone who enters a movie theater without purchasing a ticket and then proceeds to sit through the first few minutes of a film would not ordinarily then be described as ‘seeking admission’ to the theater.”)

As I explained back in December, the Trump administration’s novel interpretation of a 29-year-old statute that five previous presidents (including Trump) had interpreted differently is not just the putative basis for so much of the controversial behavior in which ICE, CBP, and other federal agencies have been engaged over the last six months; it has been overwhelmingly rejected by federal district judges from across the geographic and ideological spectrum. According to Politico’s Kyle Cheney (who’s done truly exceptional work tracking these cases) reports, “at least 360 judges [have] rejected the expanded detention strategy—in more than 3,000 cases—while just 27 backed it in about 130 cases.” (Yes, this is the same issue that has caused the backlog and mess in the federal district court in Minneapolis in which Chief Judge Schiltz recently accused ICE of violating nearly 100 court orders—all of which ordered the release of individuals the government was purporting to hold under this interpretation—and that led a government lawyer to have a widely noted public breakdown in court last week.)

Well, late Friday night, in a ruling handed down just two days after oral argument, a divided panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit adopted the extreme minority view—holding that, yes, the government can indefinitely detain without bond millions of non-citizens who have been here for generations; who have never committed a crime; and who pose neither a risk of flight nor any threat to public safety. The Fifth Circuit’s opinion was written by Judge Edith Jones and joined in full by Judge Kyle Duncan—two of the most reactionary, right-wing federal appellate judges in the country (newsletter readers may recall my November 2024 run-in with Judge Jones; perhaps she’ll add this issue of the newsletter to her folder of my work).

Hours after an immigration agent fatally shot Renee Good inside her S.U.V. on a Minneapolis street last month, a senior federal prosecutor in Minnesota sought a warrant to search the vehicle for evidence in what he expected would be a standard civil rights investigation into the agent’s use of force.

The prosecutor, Joseph H. Thompson, wrote in an email to colleagues that the Minnesota Bureau of Criminal Apprehension, a state agency that specializes in investigating police shootings, would team up with the F.B.I. to determine whether the shooting had been justified and lawful or had violated Ms. Good’s civil rights.

But later that week, as F.B.I. agents equipped with a signed warrant prepared to document blood spatter and bullet holes in Ms. Good’s S.U.V., they received orders to stop, according to several people with knowledge of the events who spoke on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to speak publicly.

The orders, they said, came from senior officials, including Kash Patel, the F.B.I. director, several of whom worried that pursuing a civil rights investigation — by using a warrant obtained on that basis — would contradict President Trump’s claim that Ms. Good “violently, willfully, and viciously ran over the ICE Officer” who fired at her as she drove her vehicle.

The Office of Personnel Management announced a final rule creating Schedule F (now renamed Schedule Policy/Career). This allows Trump to remove job protections and fire tens of thousands of federal employees who hold policymaking roles, another step in politicizing public services under his personalist regime.

Here are some quick takes, which I will revise and expand as time goes on.

Even with extreme politicization, Schedule F still matters

When I started writing about the risks of a second Trump administration at the end of his first term in office I focused on Schedule F. Now, that focus seems a little naive. The degree of politicization we have actually witnessed is on a scale that I, who could be fairly counted as one of the biggest Cassandras on this topic, did not anticipate.

About 350,000 employees have been pushed out of government, disproportionately in agencies that are seen as more liberal. Federal hirings, annual performance evaluations, and even employee awards must now consider how loyal employees are to President Trump, and are closely monitored by political appointees.

As I’ve detailed previously, employees with stronger protections than those afforded by Schedule F have been fired because they are related to the wrong person, because the investigated abuses of power, because they were tagged by the MAGA online right as being disloyal, because they refused to break the law by firing others without cause, because they are trans, because they provided accurate information to a judge, because they made public statements about the effects of the President’s policies on their agencies, or, for no reason at all.

Even as politicized reprisals against career civil servants are a fact of life of life, internal protections against such reprisals, like the Merit Systems Protection Board, have been defanged to the point of toothlessness, meaning that an employee must now go to the courts if they are treated unfairly, even as the Supreme Court has offered little reason for optimism

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The President already effectively has an at-will work force.

Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito has a new book coming out. It’s titled How Watching Fox News Made Me the Worst Version of Myself.

Just kidding, I don’t actually care what it’s called. (Fine. I can Google it for you. It’s called So Ordered: An Originalist’s View of the Constitution, the Court, and the Country.) It’s my job to read such things and… I won’t read his book. They can’t make me. Life is entirely too short.

I bring it up because the book is scheduled to be released October 6, 2026. That’s a curious date. The Supreme Court starts its 2026–27 term on October 5, the first Monday of October. Alito’s book is set to drop the next day.

It sure feels like Alito doesn’t plan on having a real job the Tuesday his book launches and instead thinks he’ll be free to run around the country promoting it. By way of context, here are publication dates for the the last four sitting Supreme Court justices who released books:

Amy Coney Barrett, September 9, 2025
Neil Gorsuch, May 5, 2025
Ketanji Brown Jackson, September 4, 2024
Sonia Sotomayor, January 25, 2022 (a children’s book)
Sonia Sotomayor, September 3, 2019

It makes sense for the justices to release their books in September. You have all the attention on the upcoming term, but the justices are free to fly around the country, giving talks and doing interviews to promote their books. May also makes sense, because the court is no longer hearing cases then, just writing and editing opinions.

The justices are busy in October. Arguably too busy to sell a book.

The release last Friday by the Department of Justice of roughly 3 million documents relating to the investigation of the late pedophile Jeffrey Epstein has created a bizarre blame game among billionaires. Epstein was able to commit unspeakable crimes on a mass scale for decades with only a slap-on-the-wrist punishment because he was rich and well-connected. The new files help flesh out our sense of his social world, which was top-heavy with plutocrats such as the current commerce secretary, Howard Lutnick (who had earlier lied about the extent of his relationship with Epstein), Microsoft cofounder Bill Gates (whose marriage to his former wife Melinda was destroyed in large part by his relationship with Epstein), PayPal cofounder Peter Thiel, LinkedIn cofounder Reid Hoffman, and Tesla CEO Elon Musk (who, like Lutnick, had been deceptive about how often he interacted with Epstein).

These men all had relationships with Epstein after his 2008 conviction and jailing for sex trafficking minors; some also had deep business or philanthropic ties to Epstein. Now that these sordid ties are finally coming back to haunt them, oligarchs are franctically throwing Epstein-related stones at each other from within their respective glass houses. When Hoffman posted on X (the social-media site owned by Musk), “We should focus on prosecuting those who committed crimes and finally getting justice for the victims.” Musk sarcastically responded, “While you’re at it, maybe you can help OJ ‘find the real killer’.” Hoffman shot back with a screenshot of a 2012 e-mail where Musk asked Epstein about visiting his private island, a missive that included this query: “What day/night will be the wildest party on your island?”

The tawdry exchange between Hoffman and Musk has all the emotional maturity of kindergarten kids accusing each other of having the cooties. In truth, none of those in Epstein’s social circle should escape culpability, since, even if they committed no crimes themselves, they were, at the very least, tolerant of Epstein’s vileness.

The Epstein files are a window into the world of the financial and political elite. What emerges from this window is an ugly site. Epstein’s coterie transcended normal political divides. Gates and Hoffman are centrist liberals who tend to support Democrats, while Thiel, Lutnick, and Musk are all ardent right-wingers. But their seeming partisan differences were as nothing compared to their common membership of the ruling class. After all, Bill Clinton and Donald Trump were both close Epstein associates.