On both scores, Republicans currently sit in very risky territory. The other is a question asking voters which party they’d like to see win - a so-called generic ballot.

Political scientists have found that two polling measures typically have provided good guidance on how midterm elections will go.

The issue for 2018 will be how many: Democrats, who currently hold 194 seats in the House, would need to pick up 24 for a majority. The party in the White House almost always loses seats in a president’s first midterm election. The current polls can tell us more, however, about next year’s midterm elections. The election is much too far away to predict and it’s possible that voters who say they disapprove of a president’s performance might cast ballots for him, regardless, if they dislike the opposing candidate. None of that means Trump would definitely lose those states if he runs for reelection in 2020. “Residents are clearly dissatisfied in how candidate Trump transitioned into President Trump,” Lee Miringoff, the director of the poll, wrote in describing his results. Those defections dwarf the size of Trump’s margin over Hillary Clinton in those three states, which ranged from eight-tenths of a point in Pennsylvania down to two-tenths of a point in Michigan.

Roughly one in five Trump voters in each of the three states chose “embarrassed” when asked how his conduct in office makes them feel.

Grim dawn secrets of the lost