Democrats hold midterm lead with independents breaking sharply against Trump

President Donald Trump’s efforts to make the midterm elections a referendum on his presidency appear to be backfiring as Democratic congressional candidates hold a significant lead over Republicans in the latest poll from PBS News, NPR and Marist.

More than half of registered voters – 53% – say they would vote for Democratic candidates if the election were today, while 41% prefer Republicans. Independents, who often decide competitive races, favor Democrats by a margin of 25 points.

Driving this sentiment is a president who isn’t on the ballot but has asked voters to pretend he is. About 7 in 10 voters acknowledge the president is a factor, one way or another, in their vote for Congress. Just 30% of voters say Trump isn’t a factor in their vote.

“The Democrats are sitting in a very good place,” said Lee Miringoff, director of the Marist Institute for Public Opinion. “There’s a lot of grumbling in the electorate and a lot of sentiment for changing things around.”

More than half of registered voters – 53% – say they would vote for Democratic candidates if the election were today, while 41% prefer Republicans. Graphic by Steff Staples/PBS News.

Trump bragged of Republicans riding his electoral coattails during his speech to the party’s midterm convention in Dallas this month, building his strategy on the premise that voters turn out for him and not for anyone else. His appeal is effective largely among self-identified MAGA supporters; 71% say in this poll that their vote for Congress is mostly a vote for the president.

But with absentee and mail voting already underway in a handful of states, the poll suggests Trump’s influence may have the opposite effect on other voters.

Overall, 45% of registered voters and 54% of independents say their vote will be mostly to express their opposition to Trump. Eight in 10 Democrats are motivated to vote against Trump.

Just 24% of voters and 12% of independents say they are voting to show support for the president.

“That’s devastating,” Democratic strategist Joel Payne said. In this political environment, he added, it’s expected that political partisans will line up behind their team, but when independents are strongly motivated to vote against one side, “that’s significant.”

The president’s own numbers have been frozen for most of the year, with 39% approving of his job performance and 59% disapproving in this latest poll. But that top line understates the asymmetry: More than half of voters – 53% – strongly disapprove of the job he’s doing, the highest share recorded by Marist across either of his terms in office, and on par with high voter dissatisfaction with Trump in the aftermath of the Jan. 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol.

Congressional Republicans have little room to run from Trump.

“It’s a nationalized election whether they like it or not,” Miringoff said.

The president’s own numbers have been frozen for most of the year, with 39% approving of his job performance and 59% disapproving in the latest PBS News/NPR/Marist poll. Graphic by Dan Cooney/PBS News.

Thirteen incumbents were defeated in their primaries this year, and dozens of members announced plans to retire or run for another office. Nearly one in five lawmakers who started this Congress will not return for the next one, according to an NPR analysis, driven by record-setting retirements and primary defeats.

READ MORE: Rising gas prices frustrate voters. Trump says it’s an ‘inexpensive price to pay’ for the Iran war

With gas prices, the war in Iran and other national issues dominating, he said, “it’d be next to impossible” for a congressional candidate to ignore those and focus only on local issues. “It’s not believable enough because [Trump’s] such a dominant force.”

“These numbers are concerning to Republicans behind the scenes,” Republican strategist Melik Abdul said.

Abdul wondered whether the president’s luck had run out.

“It’s almost like he’s Icarus,” the famous figure from Greek mythology, he said. The question is whether Trump’s “gotten a bit too close to the sun this time.”

Republicans lag in enthusiasm

The premise behind Trump’s plea to pretend he’s on the ballot points to a potential turnout problem among his base. The poll shows few signs that his appeal is closing the enthusiasm gap.

Voters overall are highly engaged. Nearly 9 in 10 say they care a great deal or quite a bit about which party controls Congress, and 75% say they’re following the midterm elections closely.

But the passion tilts toward Democrats. Seventy-six percent of Democrats say they care a great deal who wins Congress, while 67% of Republicans say the same. Additionally, 42% of Democrats are following the election very closely compared to 34% of Republicans.

Trump’s most loyal supporters match Democrats’ fervor. Three-quarters of MAGA supporters care a great deal about the outcome. But the rest of the Republican coalition that Trump is asking to show up is lagging behind.

Independents are the least engaged of all, with 30% following the race very closely.

Miringoff said that gap is the problem Trump’s messaging is trying to solve.

“When he’s not on the ballot, it doesn’t automatically transfer,” he said. The calculation Republicans have had to make, he added, is that “the enthusiasm factor for their base is a little soft.”

History is often unkind to a president in Trump’s position

File photo: President Donald Trump arrives on stage Sept. 9 at the Republican National Midterm Convention in Dallas, Texas. Photo by Evan Vucci/Reuters/File Photo

In the last 90 years, the incumbent president’s party has lost an average of 27 seats in the House of Representatives and three seats in the Senate in midterm elections, according to a recent UC Santa Barbara analysis.

In the 2018 midterm elections during Trump’s first term in office, Republicans lost 40 House seats.

A Marist poll conducted in September that year found a similar picture of the electorate compared to now. Registered voters preferred Democratic congressional candidates by 12 points, 50% to 38%. That lead narrowed in polling over the following two months, settling at 6 points in the final pre-election survey.

Of course, margins seen in September polling are a snapshot of the mood of voters, not a forecast of electoral outcomes. Unprecedented redistricting efforts have also narrowed the field of competitive House races since 2018, blunting the potential size of any wave election.

“I don’t think 40 seats is remotely in play,” Miringoff said. A gain of a dozen House seats would be a good outcome for Democrats, he said.

Democrats now lead on issues Republicans used to own

Gas prices are shown in Great Neck, New York, on Sept. 17, 2026. Photo by Shannon Stapleton/ Reuters

For a party in power, a referendum election would be more survivable if voters still trusted it to handle the toughest issues of governing.

They don’t, according to this latest poll.

Voters say Democrats would do a better job handling the economy, gas prices and foreign policy. On immigration, the Republican edge has evaporated.

In what has become an election focused on affordability, 42% of voters say Democrats would do a better job handling the economy while 34% say Republicans. In September 2022, Republicans led on the issue by 15 points, and it was a central issue that propelled Trump back to the White House in 2024.

The economic mood beneath the latest numbers is sour. Inflation hovers at 3.4%, up from 3% the month Trump began his second term and driven in part by the president’s tariffs and the ongoing war in Iran that has slowed a global shipping route.

Thirty-four percent of voters say their family finances have gotten worse over the past year. Another 20% say their finances have improved, and 42% say they’ve stayed the same. Twenty-nine percent report having a financial hardship in the past year., In households earning under $50,000, that number rises to 44%.

Voters overall give Democrats the edge on gas prices by a 13-point margin and foreign policy by 6 points.

Forty-five percent of registered voters say their vote will be mostly to express their opposition to Trump. Graphic by Steff Staples/PBS News.

On each issue measured in the poll, independent voters favor Democrats by double digits. On the economy, Democrats have a 19-point edge; on gas prices, 26 points; on foreign policy, 22 points.

“It’s everywhere in the data that these independents are looking for new ideas, change,” Miringoff said.

On immigration, Trump’s signature issue over the past decade, Republicans have similarly lost their advantage. They led by 12 points in February 2024. Now Democrats lead among all voters by 3 points, inside the poll’s margin of error.

That movement appears to reflect a year of public reaction to Trump administration enforcement tactics rather than to border policy itself. The shooting deaths of several American citizens at the hands of federal agents, as well as the treatment of migrants in detention centers, made headlines.

After strong early numbers for the Trump administration on immigration, Abdul said, voters reacted to aggressive enforcement. “People began to not like how those policies were being implemented, even though they may agree with the overall policy itself,” he said.

The divide has even surfaced inside Trump’s own party. Last week, Rep. María Salazar, a Republican whose Miami-area district is heavily Latino, released a campaign ad that was recorded outside the White House.

“Mr. President, some of your immigration enforcement efforts have gone too far,” she said. “The same Hispanics who helped you get to the White House in 2024 feel betrayed today.”

Trump, who endorsed Salazar’s re-election months earlier, pushed back, but the poll suggests Salazar isn’t alone in her party: a third of Republicans say immigrants here without legal permission should have a way to stay if they meet certain requirements.

Hispanic voters may have helped elect Trump in 2024, but the upcoming midterms will be the “first test” of how they feel about his immigration policy now, said Abdul.

Payne cautioned his own party against reading too much into it. “It’s less of a statement of significant approval of Democrats, and it is more a statement of disapproval and no confidence about Republicans and Trump,” he said. “We’re in an era of a lot of coalition-by-convenience, and right now, the coalition of convenience is lining up behind Democrats. But that is not a passionate coalition. That is a very soft coalition.”

Part of the problem, Abdul said, is that Republicans can’t get their own message heard. “It’s hard to articulate what the party is doing because Donald Trump himself sucks all of the oxygen out of the room,” he said.

Other highlights from the poll

• Voters don’t like data centers. Fifty-eight percent of U.S. voters say the construction of new data centers by companies like Amazon, Google, Meta, Microsoft and OpenAI will mostly have a negative effect on the country. And 65% of voters oppose construction in their communities, including 43% who are strongly opposed. A quarter of voters say they support data center construction.
• Fewer voters plan to vote by mail. Nearly a quarter plan to cast a mail ballot this year; 31% voted by mail in the 2024 presidential election. After more than a year of Trump’s attacks, 41% of voters say there is a great deal or good amount of fraud when people can vote by mail. About tThree-quarters of Republicans and self-identified MAGA supporters feel that way, compared with 18% of Democrats and 32% of independents.
• High trust in local elections. At the same time, 75% of voters trust their state or local government to run a fair and accurate election. Among Democrats, 86% say they are somewhat or very confident, while 66% of Republicans say the same.
• A hunger for something new.. By an 18-point margin, voters say it’s more important this year to vote for candidates with new ideas who will bring about change than for candidates with experience and a proven record. Voters under 45 years old favored change by a 42-point margin.
• Democrats favor new ideas over experience, 73% to 21%. Among self-identified democratic socialists, it’s 84% to 13%. That lines up with the primaries when several Democratic House incumbents lost to challengers aligned with democratic socialism or who represented generational change. Independents side with change, 65% to 31%.
• Republicans run the other way, favoring experience by 34 points. Their incumbent losses were seen more as a test of loyalty to Trump among the Republican base.

PBS News, NPR and Marist Poll conducted a survey from Sept. 14 to 15, 2026, that polled 1,280 registered voters by phone, text and online with a margin of error of 3.8 percentage points. For Democrats, the margin of error is 6.5 percentage points; Republicans, 6.8 percentage points; independents, 7.2 percentage points.