Voters split on generic congressional ballot: survey

Julia Mueller
·2 min read
20

Democrats and Republicans are neck and neck on a generic congressional ballot just six weeks out from this year’s midterm elections, new polling shows.

The Washington Post-ABC News poll released Sunday found 47 percent of voters reported they’d support a Republican candidate and 46 percent said they’d support a Democrat if the midterms were held today.

About 2 percent of voters said they’d back neither, and 1 percent said they’d back someone else. Another 4 percent reported having no opinion on which party they’d support.

The close 1-point split between Democrats and Republicans is notably within the poll’s margin of error, and the results add to other recent surveys indicating a tight race between the parties as midterm campaigns ramp up.

A Harvard CAPS-Harris Poll released earlier this month on the hypothetical congressional ballot put Democrats ahead of Republicans by 2 percentage points.

Asked which party they trusted to do a better job handling the nation’s problems over the next few years, respondents in The Washington Post-ABC News poll were evenly split between Democrats and Republicans, at 42 percent each. Nine percent said they trusted neither party, and 1 percent said they trusted both.

Forty-nine percent of voters said they’d prefer to see the next Congress controlled by Republicans “to act as a check” on President Biden rather than by Democrats “to support Biden’s agenda.” Forty-five percent of voters chose the latter option.

A larger share of voters said they trusted Democrats over Republicans to deal with issues of abortion, climate change, education and schools, while higher percentages of voters said they trusted Republicans over Democrats to deal with the economy, crime, immigration and inflation.

The Washington Post-ABC News poll was conducted Sept. 18-21 and surveyed 1,006 U.S. adults. Of those, 908 were registered voters. The margin of error was 3.5 percentage points overall, and 4 percentage points among registered voters.

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