Most likely voters in US elections on Tuesday prefer a Republican-controlled Congress, an opinion poll showed in a new indication that Republicans are poised to make substantial gains.
The final NBC News/Wall Street Journal survey before the elections showed that 49 per cent of likely voters prefer a Republican-controlled Congress, versus 43 per cent who want Democrats to remain in charge.
"The Democrats are about to feel the force of hurricane winds," Democratic pollster Peter Hart, one of the conductors of the survey, is quoted as saying.
Forty per cent of those polled said it would be a "good thing" if Republicans controlled both the House of Representatives and the Senate, compared with 34 per cent who said it would be a "bad thing".
As many as 84 per cent of Americans were dissatisfied with the state of the US economy, and 60 per cent believed the country is headed in the wrong direction, the poll indicated.
A combined 63 per cent -- including 47 per cent of Democrats -- said they wanted to see "a great deal of change" or "quite a bit of change" in the way President Barack Obama has been leading the country.
Obama's job-approval rating stood at 45 per cent, a two-point decline from the last poll. Twenty-eight per cent of those surveyed identified themselves as tea party supporters.
Among these supporters, 57 per cent would replace every single member of Congress if they could, according to the poll, which has detected the same sentiment among 45 per cent of all registered voters.
The survey of 1,000 registered voters was taken from october 28 to october 30 and had an overall margin of error of plus-minus 3.1 percentage points.