US President Joe Biden speaks during a rally for gubernatorial candidate Wes Moore and the Democratic Party on the eve of the US midterm elections, at Bowie State University in Bowie, Maryland, on November 7, 2022.
US President Joe Biden's public approval rating dipped to 39 percent in a Reuters/Ipsos poll, reinforcing nonpartisan election forecasters' expectations that his Democratic party was in for a drubbing in Tuesday's midterm elections.
The two-day national poll revealed on Monday found that Americans' approval of Biden's job performance had dropped by one point, nearing the lowest point of his presidency.
Biden's unpopularity is helping drive the view that Republicans will win control of the US House of Representatives and possibly the US Senate as well on Tuesday.
The University of Virginia's Center for Politics on Monday forecast that Republicans would easily win a majority in the House, picking up a net 24 seats, and would eke out a slim majority in the Senate.
Control of even one chamber of Congress would give Republicans the power to bring Biden's legislative agenda to a halt.
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US states like Georgia have enacted more than 30 new voting restrictions due to Republican claims of voter fraud in the 2020 election.
— TRT World (@trtworld) November 8, 2022
But critics say the rules target working-class minorities who generally vote for the Democrats pic.twitter.com/jWXbuOttRy
High inflation
Taking office in January 2021 in the middle of the Covid-19 pandemic, Biden's term has been marked by the economic scars of the global health crisis, including soaring inflation. This year, his approval rating drifted as low as 36 percent in May and June.
In this week's Reuters/Ipsos poll, about a third of respondents picked the economy as the country's biggest problem, a much larger share than the roughly one in 10 who picked crime. About one in 15 said the biggest problem was the end of national abortion rights, following the Supreme Court's June decision that struck down a nationwide right to abortion.
The Reuters/Ipsos poll, conducted online in English throughout the United States, gathered responses from 1,004 adults, including 424 Democrats and 390 Republicans. It has a credibility interval — a measure of precision — of 4 percentage points either way.
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'Democracy at stake'
Biden told Americans that democracy is at stake in Tuesday's midterm elections and "this is your moment to defend it."
"We know in our bones that our democracy is at risk and we know that this is your moment to defend it," he told a cheering crowd of Democratic supporters at an election eve rally Monday in Bowie, Maryland.
"We'll meet this moment," he said.
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