Republican hopes of winning Senate races in Georgia and North Carolina have been fading, and the GOP is increasingly focused on playing defense elsewhere with five weeks until the midterm elections. Republicans haven’t abandoned the Southern battlegrounds, which Donald Trump carried narrowly in the 2024 presidential race, though they're shifting greater resources to states they see as more competitive. The party is spending heavily to defend GOP-heavy Texas, and Trump plans to campaign for the Republican incumbent in Ohio. They're both places Trump won easily in 2024. The shift comes as Republicans become more vocal in their public criticism that Trump has squandered an opportunity to more comfortably hold off Democrats this fall.