Poll: Democrats likely to win House, GOP likely to keep Senate

WASHINGTON — The last year has seen the enactment of a major tax cut, the firstever summit between a U.S. president and the leader of North Korea, felony convictions and guilty pleas from two of the president’s former top aides and a bitterly fought battle over confirmation of a Supreme Court justice.

None fundamentally changed the overall race for control of Congress.

With the midterm now just over two weeks away, the election stands almost exactly as it did nine months ago, in mid-January: Democrats remain favored to win back a majority of the House, but haven’t decisively locked the contest down; Republicans remain favored to keep control of the Senate.

The uncanny stability, despite the year’s history-shaping headlines and furious controversies, testifies to the key political fact of our era: a deep and solidly entrenched partisan divide, made both wider and more intractable by the polarizing nature of the drama’s central figure, President Donald Trump.

Trump “took over politics with his surprising victory in 2016 and now, two years in, the country is going to vote about him a second time,” said Mike Murphy, the longtime Republican strategist and critic of Trump who is the co-director of the University of Southern California’s Center for the Political Future.

The challenge for Trump is that this time, he’s not matched up against Hillary Clinton. Instead, the election has been driven by two forces: Democrats’ deep anger toward Trump and what he stands for, coupled with the desire of a smaller, but crucial, bloc of swing voters to have Congress provide a check on a president whom many see as headstrong and risky.

The latest USC Dornsife/Los Angeles Times poll of voters nationwide shows Democrats with a 55 percent-42 percent lead when likely voters were asked which party’s candidate they would vote for in the Nov. 6 midterm election. The survey is the first of three weekly tracking polls of voter sentiment that USC and the Times plan to release between now and Election Day.

That 13-point Democratic advantage on the generic ballot — so called because it asks voters about party labels rather than specific candidates — is roughly similar to the findings of some other recent polls. An NBC/Wall Street Journal survey released Sunday, for example, showed Democrats with a 9-point advantage, 50 percent to 41 percent.

The desire to vote against Trump runs especially strong among female voters, particularly college-educated white women and minority women.

Their distaste for the administration — anger in many cases — has created political battlegrounds in suburban districts that once reliably voted for Republicans from Orange County, Calif., to northern New Jersey. Democrats have a strong chance of winning enough of those districts to gain the additional 23 seats they need to have a majority in the House.

Just over half of the likely female voters in the USC/L.A. Times poll, 51 percent, said they saw their vote as an expression of opposition to Trump, compared with 24 percent who said it would express support for Trump and 25 percent who said neither. Men divided almost evenly on that question, with 38 percent in opposition, 36 percent in support and 26 percent saying neither.