Maine Sen. Susan Collins (R) is running far ahead of President Trump's approval rating in her campaign for reelection. (AP/Mariam Zuhaib)

This week’s Pollwatcher looks at Americans’ attitudes and behaviors toward college education and highlights polls from two key House districts. But first …

How much can Republicans outrun Trump’s approval ratings?

Last week, a Maine poll made waves for showing Republican Sen. Susan Collins slightly ahead of Troy Jackson, a break from other polls showing the Democrat with a narrow lead.

Maine’s Senate race is clearly a toss-up, but another finding from the same New York Times-Portland Press Herald-Siena University poll stood out: 49 percent of likely voters supported Collins even though 32 percent of likely voters approved of President Donald Trump’s job performance. The Republican senator was outrunning Trump by a whopping 17 percentage points.

The result points to a big question hanging over this fall’s midterm elections: How much can Republicans outrun Trump’s approval ratings?

What the latest polls say

New polling provides some answers. The chart below compares Trump’s approval ratings with Republican support in recent high-quality polls that included both measures.

Nationally, Republicans are running four percentage points ahead of Trump’s approval ratings, 41 percent versus 37 percent. Republican Senate candidates also average four points more support than Trump, but there’s a big range across seven key states.

Collins is outrunning Trump by an average of 10 percentage points, suggesting last week’s poll was a bit of an outlier on this front. Republican Mike Rogers outpaces Trump by eight points in Michigan, while former senator John Sununu tops Trump by seven points in New Hampshire. But in North Carolina, Ohio, Iowa and Texas, Republican Senate candidates are running no more than two points ahead of Trump’s approval ratings.

What does history show?

National and state exit polls measure approval of the president, offering an excellent window into how much candidates are tied to a president’s popularity in midterm elections. The chart below compares presidential approval and support for candidates from the president’s party for the midterm elections under the last two Democratic and Republican presidents, including more than 75 contests across 44 states.

On average, House and Senate candidates from the president’s party outperform the president’s approval ratings by two percentage points, 46 percent versus 44 percent. In 2022, Democratic Senate candidates outperformed then-President Joe Biden’s approval ratings by a remarkable six points on average. The pattern doesn’t always hold, with Republican Senate candidates actually underperforming Trump’s approval ratings in 2018 Senate contests.

Exit polls show some extraordinary aberrations. In 2006, Sen. Olympia Snowe (R-Maine) won reelection with 74 percent of the vote, even as only 34 percent of voters approved of President George W. Bush. And in 2018, West Virginia Republican Patrick Morrisey won 46 percent of the vote in his bid to unseat Sen. Joe Manchin III (D-West Virginia), even as 63 percent of the state’s voters approved of Trump.

But those cases are unusual. Fewer than 1 in 4 U.S. Senate candidates surpass the president’s approval rating by six percentage points or more, and fewer than 1 in 10 exceed presidential approval by at least 10 points. When a president’s ratings are low, most candidates from their party go down with the ship.

Poll of two key House districts shows good signs for Democrats, but no tsunami — Several House seats could flip blue in Virginia this fall, with a new Washington Post-Schar School poll showing one Democrat ahead in a district held by Republicans for decades and another modestly behind in a deeply red district that Trump carried by double digits just two years ago.

Check out our story on the poll. Picking up on the storyline above, Republican Rep. Rob Wittman is running five points above Trump’s approval rating in the 1st District (46 percent versus 41 percent), while Republican John McGuire is running four points above Trump in the 5th District (51 percent versus 47 percent).

Record low say college is important, but there’s a caveat — A Gallup poll released Thursday finds 31 percent of U.S. adults say a college education is “very important,” ticking down from 35 percent last year but down sharply from 51 percent in 2019 and 70 percent in 2013. The current poll finds another 39 percent saying college is “fairly important,” while 29 percent say it isn’t important.

But the shift in opinions hasn’t reduced college enrollment. As The Post’s Danielle Douglas-Gabriel reported in January, enrollment at colleges and universities increased for the third straight year in fall 2025, leading to the largest total enrollment in a decade according to the National Student Clearinghouse Research Center.

Study finds AI is bad at imitating human survey respondents — The Pew Research Center released a study testing whether AI models can accurately mimic answers from human survey respondents. “We used a ‘digital twins’ approach for this study, asking an AI model to adopt the personas of real humans” who are members of their national survey panel, giving the model a wide range of information about each panelist from previous surveys.

On average, AI-generated samples differed by 12.4 percentage points from the human samples they attempted to mirror. Among other patterns, AI samples were prone to leaning on racial or partisan stereotypes, estimating that 97 percent of Hispanic adults were likely to follow the World Cup (the actual poll found 43 percent) and that 95 percent of Republicans like Israel (actually 58 percent).

Send your questions, comments and ideas to scott.clement@washpost.com.

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