Trump approval rating steady at 32%, close to record low, Reuters/Ipsos poll finds

US President Donald Trump's approval rating remained close to a record low, and a large share of the American electorate viewed their vote in Tuesday's congressional elections as an opportunity to push back against the Republican president, according to a Reuters/Ipsos poll completed on Monday.

The five-day nationwide survey also indicated that the contest between Democrats and Republicans may be growing tighter as the midterm elections approach.

On what pollsters call the generic ballot question, 46% of registered voters said they would support Democrats in the congressional elections, while 38% said they would back Republicans. That eight-point edge for Democrats was smaller than the 11-point advantage the party held in a Reuters/Ipsos survey conducted a week earlier.

Generic ballot polls ask voters across the country which party they would prefer to see in control of Congress, offering a broad snapshot of national sentiment. They do not, however, reflect the details of the state-by-state and district-by-district races that actually decide control of the US Senate and the US House of Representatives, contests in which Republicans enjoy certain structural advantages.

Just 32% of respondents said they approved of the job Trump is doing in the White House. That figure was unchanged from the previous week and sat only slightly above his record-low reading of 31% recorded two weeks earlier.

The poll also highlighted how central the president is to voters' thinking. Among registered voters, half of independents, 50%, said they regarded their congressional vote as a vote against Trump. By comparison, 13% said their vote amounted to a show of support for the president, while 33% said Trump was not a factor in their decision at all.

The latest Reuters/Ipsos survey was conducted online among 1,765 US adults and carried a margin of error of 2 percentage points.