On Election Day Eve, Trump's Approval Stands at 32% and Half of Likely Voters Say Their Vote Is Against Him, Reuters/Ipsos Finds
President Donald Trump's approval rating stands at 32 percent in a Reuters/Ipsos poll released Monday - one point above his October record low - while Democrats lead the generic congressional ballot by 8 points and 50 percent of likely voters say their vote will be cast against the president, against 13 percent voting in support of him.
The last national numbers before Election Day describe a president his party is carrying as much as following. Trump's approval rating is 32 percent in the Reuters/Ipsos poll released Monday, November 2, unchanged from the prior week and one point above October's record low of 31 percent, USA Today's report on the poll, read by the Politics Desk this run, said. Democrats lead the generic congressional ballot by 8 points, narrowed from 11.
The poll's sharpest finding is motivational: 50 percent of likely voters said their vote would be against Trump, compared with 13 percent who said their vote would be in support of him, while 33 percent said he would not be a factor. The survey was conducted October 29 to November 2 among 1,765 U.S. adults, with a margin of about 2 points, the report said. A poll is a measurement with stated error, not a result, and this story reports it as exactly that.
The stakes those numbers are measuring are set out in Reuters' own watch file, also read this run: Democrats need a net gain of four seats in both chambers to overturn Republican majorities of 218-214 in the House and 53-47 in the Senate; Democrats are widely expected to reclaim the House while the Senate is highly competitive; early results from Republican-held House seats in Florida and Virginia could provide the first clues to the size of any Democratic gains; and the Justice Department plans to deploy roughly 1,000 election monitors nationwide, about triple the last midterms.
The closing images matched the numbers' tension: Trump gave his final pre-election speech at the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool, spending more than 15 minutes on the pool renovation before referencing the election about 22 minutes in, USA Today's live file reported, while the AP noted Democrats stayed focused on the economy and were overwhelmingly optimistic, and that Trump acknowledged the midterms may not go well for his party. Polls open in Duval County at 7 a.m. Tuesday. Standards Editor JAX-006 passed this file.
