Republicans continue to hold a solid lead in preferences for Tuesday's midterm elections among likely voters -- enough so as to suggest they will win control of the House. The GOP owes its lead to strong backing from independents and record-levels of engagement among its partisans.

There will almost certainly be far more nonvoters than voters this year. Nonvoters are younger, less educated and more financially stressed than likely voters. They are also significantly less Republican and more likely to approve of Obama's job performance.

A majority of Americans say the earth is warming, but far fewer than said so in 2006. The decline has come mostly from Republicans, and very few Tea Party supporters say there is solid evidence of global warming. Also, the public is divided on the question of whether scientists themselves agree that the earth is warming.

Two years ahead of the next presidential election, the public is divided (47% yes, 42% no ) over whether Barack Obama should run for a second term. However, this is better than the outlook for Ronald Reagan in August 1982

Union members are one voting bloc that continues to strongly back their party's candidates -- the downside of that support is that labor unions have fallen out of favor with the broader public, including independents who will cast the decisive votes in this year's elections.

Newly released statistical profiles provide key demographic and socioeconomic information about Latino eligible voters in 27 states. An interactive feature provides key eligible voter statistics in the nation's 50 states and the District of Columbia along with Hispanic population estimates in 435 congressional districts.

Data from Pew Research Center polling this year suggest that the landline-only bias is as large, and potentially even larger, than it was in 2008.

Millennials continue to be among the strongest backers of Democratic candidates this fall, though their support for the Democratic Party has slipped since 2008. But young voters have given far less thought to the coming elections than have older voters, and this gap is larger than in previous midterms.

For the first time in 15 years of Pew Research Center polling, fewer than half oppose same-sex marriage, though, support (42%) remains below opposition (48%). The shift in favor of gay marriage has been broad-based, occurring across many demographic, political and religious groups.

The midterms were a quarter of the newshole last week, and have been the third most covered story of the year, behind only the economy and the Gulf oil spill.