By Jason Lange
WASHINGTON, Nov 2 (Reuters) – President Donald Trump’s approval rating held near a record low as a broad swath of the US electorate saw their vote in Tuesday’s congressional elections as a way to oppose the Republican president, according to a Reuters/Ipsos poll completed on Monday.
The results of the five-day nationwide poll also showed signs the race between Democrats and Republicans could be tightening ahead of Election Day.
Some 46% of registered voters in the poll said they would pick Democrats in congressional elections, compared to 38% who picked Republicans, in what is known as a “generic ballot” question. That 8 percentage point advantage for Democrats was narrower than in a Reuters/Ipsos poll conducted a week earlier, when Democrats led by 11 points.
Generic ballot polls are national polls that provide an overall view of which party voters would like to see in charge in Congress. While these polls provide a view of national public sentiment, they do not capture the nuances of the state-by-state and district-by-district contests that determine control of the US Senate and US House, contests in which Republicans hold some structural advantages.
Some 32% of respondents said they approved of the job Trump was doing in the White House, unchanged from a week earlier and just above his record-low reading of 31% two weeks ago.
Among registered voters, some 50% of independents said they saw their vote in congressional elections as a vote against Trump, compared with 13% who said it was a vote for Trump and 33% who said the president wasn’t a factor in their vote.
The latest Reuters/Ipsos poll surveyed 1,765 US adults online and had a margin of error of 2 percentage points.
(Reporting by Jason Lange in Washington; editing by Scott Malone and Deepa Babington)
