With President Donald Trump at record unpopularity, Republicans are facing an even bleaker midterm political landscape than they did eight years ago, a new CNN poll conducted by SSRS finds.

Nationally, voters say they prefer Democratic candidates over Republicans by an eight-point margin – slightly more modest than their 12-point advantage in CNN’s September polling conducted by SSRS ahead of the 2018 midterms in Trump’s first presidency.

The study was conducted for CNN via web and telephone on the SSRS Opinion Panel, a nationally representative panel of U.S. adults ages 18 or older recruited using probability-based sampling techniques. Surveys were obtained September 16-17, 2026, with a representative sample of n=1,206 respondents. The margin of sampling error for total respondents is +/-3.5 at the 95% confidence level. The design effect is 1.6.