President Donald Trump has turned one familiar feature of midterm election campaigns inside out: Democrats are now more likely to vote than Republicans. That remarkable finding emerges from the new NBC News/Wall Street Journal poll just two weeks before Election Day. As the president's job approval rose to an all-time high of 47 percent, Republicans narrowed their double-digit September deficit for control of Congress to seven percentage points among all registered voters. But among the smaller group considered likely voters, the Democratic advantage grows to nine points, 50 percent to 41 percent. "It's something I've never seen before," said Bill McInturff, the veteran Republican pollster who conducts the NBC/WSJ survey with Democratic counterpart Peter Hart. "The likely voter model tips toward the Democrats." That signals a break, at least temporarily, in recent midterm pattern of Democratic candidates suffering from sub-par turnout among sympathetic constituencies, especially Latinos and younger voters. In October 2010, just before Republicans recaptured the House, and 2014, the electorate became more Republican as the universe of those registered was winnowed to likely voters.

In the 2018 homestretch, rising interest among millenials, Latinos and women alienated by Trump has flipped the script. Compared to four years ago, interest has surged more than twenty percentage points among younger women and women with college degrees. The emotion-fueled campaign season has galvanized Democrats and Republicans alike, presaging high turnout overall. The war over Supreme Court justice Brett Kavanaugh accelerated partisan mobilization already underway in fierce battles for pivotal House and Senate seats. Fully 65 percent of all voters express high interest in the battle for Congress, exceeding pre-election levels in 2006, 2010, and 2014. But the poll showed interest slightly higher among Democrats than Republicans, among those who backed Hillary Clinton in 2016 than Trump voters, among women than men, among non-whites than whites. The telephone survey of 900 registered voters, conducted Oct. 14-17, has a margin for error of 3.27 percentage points. For the 645 respondents deemed likely voters, the margin for error is 3.86 percentage points. Projecting who will actually vote is hardly an exact science. NBC/WSJ pollsters combine information about respondents' stated interest, age and past voting behavior to create a model of the likely electorate.