WASHINGTON — Nine points separate the parties among likely voters in the congressional elections, according to a Reuters/Ipsos poll released Monday.
The district-by-district choice broke 53% for the Democrat and 44% for the Republican. Both totals include people who only leaned toward a party, Ipsos said.
The poll gave Democrats the edge on the economy, too. That is a turnabout. Back in January 2025, Republicans led on the issue by 17 points.
This time 34% of Americans said Democrats would handle the economy better. For Republicans the figure was 28%.
President Donald Trump’s numbers on the economy ran below his overall rating. Among all adults in the survey, 25% approved of how he is handling the economy. On the cost of living he got 20%.
Overall, 32% approved of the job Trump is doing. Ipsos put that near the lowest mark of his presidency.
Republicans were not much kinder on living costs. Fewer than half of them, 48%, approved of Trump’s handling of that issue. His economy rating inside his own party was better, at 62%.
The intensity has slipped as well. In the new poll, 42% of Republicans said they approved of Trump’s performance “somewhat.” Another 34% approved “strongly.” Ipsos said Republicans are now likelier to choose the weaker of the two answers than they were when his second term began.
Democrats, meanwhile, were keener to vote in the midterms. Ipsos has seen that same gap in enthusiasm all through the fall.
The poll, conducted Oct. 22-26, was based on interviews with 1,679 adults age 18 and older drawn from Ipsos’s probability-based KnowledgePanel. Interviews were in English. The results were then weighted for demographic differences, party identification and how each respondent voted in 2024.
Likely voters got a separate weighting. It covered registered respondents who planned to vote or had already voted, and it used demographic characteristics along with county voting history.
For the full adult sample, the margin of sampling error is plus or minus 2.4 percentage points at the 95% confidence level. Margins for subgroups are larger, Ipsos said. For likely voters, the margin is plus or minus 2.9 percentage points.
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