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Democrats hold 7-point edge going into midterms: poll

by Kyle Balluck - 11/04/18 9:22 AM ET

Democrats hold a 7-point lead over Republicans for control of Congress in a poll released two days before the midterm elections.

Half of likely voters in the NBC News/Wall Street Journal poll released early Sunday said they would prefer a Congress controlled by Democrats. Forty-three percent said they want a Republican majority.

Democrats lead by 6 points among registered voters, 49 percent to 43 percent.

Pollsters said Democrats are seeing support from African-American voters, Latinos, young voters, independents and white women with college degrees.

{mosads}Older voters, men, white voters and white women and white men without college degrees more often back Republicans, according to the survey.

“It is a political kaleidoscope,” Democratic pollster Peter Hart, whose firm helped conduct the survey, said the results show a “political kaleidoscope.”

“You turn the poll one way, and it looks [good for Democrats],” he said, according to NBC News.

But he added that “you can see how the GOP squeaks through.”

The survey of 1,000 registered voters was conducted Nov. 1 through Nov. 3. Its results have a 3.1 percentage point margin of error for registered voters and a 3.5 percentage point margin of error for likely voters.

The new poll comes on the same day that ABC News and The Washington Post published a poll that found that Democrats lead the GOP by 8 points among likely voters, 52 to 44 percent, on a generic congressional ballot.

That lead shrinks to 49 percent to 44 percent in districts that ABC labeled “toss-ups.”

Democrats led by 14 percentage points in the August ABC News/Washington Poll, and by 13 points in October’s poll.

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A RealClearPolitics average of generic ballot polls shows Democrats with a 7 percentage point lead over Republicans.

Democrats need to pick up 23 seats to reclaim the majority in the House, and must gain two seats in the Senate to secure a majority in the upper chamber.