Trump Approval at 32 Percent in the Final Reuters/Ipsos Poll — and the Generic Ballot Tightened to 46–38 as Election Day Arrived

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 and read in full by this desk. Some 32 percent of respondents said they approved of the job Trump is doing in the White House — unchanged from a week earlier, and just above his record-low reading of 31 percent two weeks ago. On the question that frames the night ahead, 46 percent of registered voters said they would pick Democrats in congressional elections, compared to 38 percent who picked Republicans — the generic-ballot question, which asks voters which party they would like to see in charge of Congress.

The movement inside the poll cuts in the opposite direction from its headline. That eight-point Democratic advantage was narrower than in the Reuters/Ipsos poll conducted a week earlier, when Democrats led by eleven points — signs, Reuters reports, that the race between the parties could be tightening ahead of Election Day. The independent vote explains much of the president's exposure: among registered voters, 50 percent of independents said they saw their vote in the congressional elections as a vote against Trump, compared with 13 percent who said it was a vote for Trump and 33 percent who said the president was not a factor in their vote. The latest poll surveyed 1,765 US adults online over five days and carried a margin of error of two percentage points.

The desk's discipline with a poll is to report it as a measurement, not a forecast — and Reuters' own caveat belongs in the story: generic-ballot polls provide a view of national public sentiment, but they do not capture the nuances of the state-by-state and district-by-district contests that actually determine control of the Senate and the House, contests in which Republicans hold some structural advantages. New Jersey voters will supply their own district-level answers tomorrow, in a Senate race and twelve House races that no national sample can call. What the final national measurement says, on the last day it can be taken, is that the president goes into Election Day at 32 percent approval, that his party trails the generic ballot by eight, and that the gap was eleven a week ago. All three of those numbers are the poll's. Tuesday's numbers will be the voters'.