Politico-Morning Consult Poll: GOP Makes Gains in Midterm Elections

With just under six weeks to go until the midterm elections, a new poll suggests the GOP is narrowing the gap with Democrats after a summer of backlash over the reversal of Roe v. Wade and a series of Democrat legislative gains.

A recent Politico-Morning Consult poll reveals that the Democrats' advantage over Republicans has fallen to within the margin of error, with respondents favoring Democrats over Republicans 45% to 43%. The Democrats' lead is also down two points from a previous poll by the survey group.

Twelve percent of those surveyed said they were not sure or did not have an opinion about which party they wanted to win in the midterm elections.

Down five percentage points from a previous poll by the group, just 41% of voters polled approved of President Joe Biden's job performance, signaling that the national mood is souring on the president in the final leg of the midterm election cycle.

Several other polls have also suggested that the GOP is gaining on the Democrats. In generic congressional ballot polling, Republicans now have a 0.4-point lead over Democrats, according to the most recent polling aggregate from RealClearPolitics.

The GOP was predicted to cruise to victory in the midterm elections at the beginning of the summer, but backlash over the Supreme Court's decision to strike down Roe v. Wade and a few Democrat legislative wins seemed enough to reduce the predicted "red wave" to a mere trickle.  

While FiveThirtyEight and others have since predicted that Democrats will win the Senate and Republicans will win the House, recent polls have found a shift in the political headwinds that favors the GOP. Tight races in Ohio, Georgia and Wisconsin, among others, could determine the balance of power in the evenly split Senate.

Some experts have warned, however, that the polling may be inaccurate. Former George W. Bush press secretary Ari Fleischer recently said that polls oversample registered voters.  

"Registered voters don't vote," Fleischer told Fox News' Laura Ingraham. "Voters vote. And so you need to switch to likely voters. Likely voters always vote more Republican than registered voters. And right now, the media is still using an overbroad pool of people called registered voters."

The poll was conducted Sept. 23-25 and surveyed 2,005 registered voters. It had a margin of error of plus or minus two percentage points.

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