Poll: Majority says Trump will have ‘a lot’ of impact on midterm vote

A majority of Americans in a new poll says President Trump will influence how they vote in next month’s midterms. 

The USA TODAY/Suffolk University Poll released Thursday found that 58 percent of likely voters said Trump will have “a lot” of impact when they head to the voting booth. Just more than one-third — 35 percent — of the respondents said they will oppose Trump and 23 percent will vote to support him.

{mosads}Twenty-five percent of likely voters said Trump won’t have any effect on their midterm votes, according to the poll.

Trump has previously told supporters that he believes he will factor into the midterms, but he also told The Associated Press in an interview this month that he won’t accept the blame if Republicans lose control of the House.

“No, I think I’m helping people,” he said at the time. “I don’t believe anybody’s ever had this kind of an impact.”

Prediction models and polling show that the Democrats are likely to retake the House, but that the GOP should retain control of the Senate and possibly expand its majority in the upper chamber.

The USA TODAY/Suffolk University Poll published Thursday found that Democrats have an 8-point advantage on the generic congressional ballot, with 51 percent of likely voters saying they’ll support Democrats and 43 percent saying they’ll back Republicans.

The poll’s results were based on phone interviews with 1,000 likely voters from Oct. 18 through Oct. 22. It has a margin of error of 3 percentage points.