New Hampshire Sen. Kelly Ayotte recently revoked her support for Donald Trump and has promised to stand up to both Trump and Hillary Clinton. | AP Photo Republicans fret down-ballot wave The GOP is still racing to assess the damage from Trump's latest scandal, as a new national poll showed Democrats making big strides in the fight for Congress.

Congressional Republicans know the collateral damage from Donald Trump’s latest scandal will be bad. They just don’t know how bad yet, and GOP leaders are preaching caution until they can figure it out — even as the first live-caller national poll since Friday showed a potential wave forming for Democrats.

An NBC/Wall Street Journal poll conducted over the weekend, following the publication of a tape of Trump lewdly describing unwanted sexual advances toward women, showed Hillary Clinton leading Trump 46 percent to 35 percent in a four-way race and Democrats with their largest lead in the congressional ballot — 49 percent versus 42 percent who said they would support Republicans for Congress — since during the 2013 government shutdown.


Ben Tulchin, a Democratic pollster, said a 6-point lead for Clinton in national polls would give Democrats a long shot at winning back the House. An 8-point lead would really put the House in play, Tulchin wrote in an email, and a double-digit lead would give Democrats “very good chances of winning back the House.”

While some campaigns and media outlets ran polls over the weekend, it is still early to judge the overall impact. Republican strategists warned Monday that they still need more time to get a full picture of how much damage the Trump tape does to their hopes of protecting Senate and House majorities. A half-dozen pollsters from both parties working on House races say that they don’t expect useful internal polling data to come in until midweek at the earliest.

Republican Senate and House strategists have boasted for months that their candidates were running far ahead of Trump and that their fates weren’t linked to the GOP presidential nominee. But they have also recognized that their candidates can only run so far ahead of the top of the ticket.

“Is this just a dip, or are our feet in cement? It feels like our feet are in cement,” said Rob Jesmer, a former executive director of the National Republican Senatorial Committee, the campaign arm of Senate Republicans. “But we don’t know yet. It’s not just this week’s data. It’s next week. We need to know if this is a blip or if it sticks.”

Jesmer also predicted undecided voters would break overwhelmingly against Trump.

One top Republican Senate strategist compared the party’s situation with the scene in the movie "Apollo 13" in which poisonous carbon dioxide slowly starts to fill the cabin, and a group of NASA employees on the ground puzzles through every item and spare part the stranded astronauts have on board, in an effort to construct a device that would keep them alive.

“Our guys are in space,” the strategist said. “We got all the s--- on the table, and we’re trying to figure out how to get them home. ... And just like in the movie, we’ll get them home.

“I know everyone’s hair [is] on fire, and they’re having a panic attack,” the strategist continued. “But I don’t think we’re going to know anything for a week. Nobody has data yet.”

At the same time, though, some GOP campaigns are preparing to actively run on the idea that Trump cannot win the presidency, instead presenting themselves as a check-and-balance on future President Hillary Clinton.

“People are scripting their ‘check-and-balance’ television ads right now,” one national Republican strategist said over the weekend. “And on Monday morning, they’ll decide whether to hit send.”

Some Republicans have been using variations on the “check and balance” theme for months. Florida Sen. Marco Rubio and New Hampshire Sen. Kelly Ayotte, who recently revoked her support for Trump, have promised to stand up to both Trump and Clinton. GOP Rep. Mike Coffman of Colorado released a widely publicized television ad on the theme in August, though it ran sparingly on TV channels in his district.

Republicans famously adopted the strategy in the 1996 elections, in which they picked up two Senate seats even as Bill Clinton romped to a wide presidential victory over Bob Dole.

But there are multiple major differences between today and 1996: Trump’s approval ratings are dismal, while a majority of voters had a favorable opinion about Dole, according to Gallup data. Dole also went along with the Republican strategy, while Trump has already labeled Republicans who are breaking with him as “hypocrites” and suggested they’ll lose their reelection bids.

Some Republicans were skeptical about a “check and balance” message as a panacea, instead urging GOP candidates to try to make their opponents unelectable.

“With four weeks to go, there’s certainly time for a check-and-balance campaign against Hillary Clinton to be effective,” said Robert Blizzard, a GOP pollster with the firm Public Opinion Strategies. “But, given the potential landmines of pissing off Trump’s base, Clinton’s image rating improving, Obama’s approval rating on the rise, and the generic ballot shifting underneath us, the easiest, most effective way to counter a top-of-the-ticket wave is to frame your down-ticket race as a choice and define your opponent as an unacceptable alternative.”

And promising to stand up to Trump has its own risks. Trump backers in New Hampshire began criticizing Ayotte after she declared she wouldn’t vote for him. And some Trump supporters booed Nevada Rep. Joe Heck at a rally after he said he would no longer support his party’s presidential nominee.

But Jesmer said that candidates in swing states may not have a choice.

“In most of these places, just having the Republican vote is not enough,” he said. “It’s pick your poison: Are you worried about your base not turning out? Or are you worried about not getting swing voters?”

Meanwhile, Democratic House strategists preached caution over the weekend and early Monday, noting that their races tend to be lagging indicators and the latest Trump effect would take time to trickle into races between Republican members of Congress and Democratic challengers. They are closely watching Clinton’s numbers at the national level for the first signs of a big break in their direction.

“Really, we are looking for Hillary to break 50,” one Democrat wrote in an email on Saturday. “That’s when we start feeling better.”

That’s exactly what Clinton did in her head-to-head matchup against Trump in the national NBC/Wall Street Journal poll released Monday. In a two-way ballot test, Clinton led Trump 52 percent to 38 percent.

Theodoric Meyer and Scott Bland contributed to this report.