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Heres another sign of improving Democratic prospects as Novembers midterm elections get closer: The Republican Partys edge in the generic ballot has basically evaporated.

The generic ballot refers to a poll question that asks voters which party they would support in a congressional election without naming individual candidates. Analysts tend to see it as a useful indicator.

Republicans now score 44.2% support in a RealClearPolitics average of generic ballots, with Democrats just a bit behind at 44.0%.

On Aug. 16 through Aug. 18, Democrats had the lead with 44.1% vs. the GOPs 43.9%, according to RCPs data.

The tightness is a big change from the prior eight months, when Republicans for the most part enjoyed a sizable edge in the generic ballot, as shown in the chart below.

Democrats appear to be getting a lift from several developments. For starters, gasoline prices RB00, -9.27% have declined from recent highs, even as prices for other essentials remain elevated and Americans are still worried about rampant inflation.

The GOP also has some candidates who are struggling in their campaigns. The top Republican in the Senate, Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, conceded last week that candidate quality may mean his party will fail to flip that chamber.

In addition, voters that support abortion rights and therefore lean Democratic seem more eager to turn out in the wake of the Supreme Court decision in June thatoverturned Roe v. Wade.

Also see: Democrat Pat Ryan overcomes polling gap to win bellwether special election in New York state for U.S. House seat

Weve seen an uptick in Democratic numbers over the past six weeks, said Jessica Taylor, Senate and governors editor at the nonpartisan Cook Political Report, during a panel discussion on Tuesday hosted by the German Marshall Fund of the United States, a think tank.

Theyve had legislative successes with the inflation bill, and other climate provisions thrown in there with that bill, she said, referring to Democrats big healthcare, climate and tax package.

But I think particularly the Dobbs decision that sent Roe back to the states has really energized the Democratic base. When I talk to Republican strategists, they know that theyre sort of frittering away this really good opportunity.

Related: This House seat may flip red for the first time in almost a century and indicate whether Republicans have had a really good night

The additional charts below show how betting markets see Democrats keeping their grip on the Senate but losing control of the House, along withkey Senate races to watch.

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Midterm elections: Republican edge over Democrats erodes in this one key indicator - MarketWatch

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To quote the esteemed American philosopher, Yogi Berra, "its deja vu all over again" in the wake of the FBI search of Mar-a-Lago as former President Donald Trump once again has single-handedly hijacked the nations attention.

Following the January 6th hearings, the federal-judge-approved search of Mar-a-Lago for classified documents, and the guilty plea of Trump Organizations CFO Allen Weisselberg, the 45th president of the United States is once again back in the spotlight, raising money, and consuming all the political and media oxygen available.

A few months ago, Washingtons favorite parlor game focused on guessing just how massive the red wave would be in November, wiping out Democratic control of the House and Senate.

Rising stars on the right were making trips to the all-important states of Iowa, New Hampshire, and South Carolina, and writing books with dreams of occupying the Oval Office. With President Bidens job approval numbers underwater, gas prices increasing daily, and supply chain issues affecting everyday Americans, many Democrats were rightly worried about what we might wake up to on Wednesday, November 9th.

AFTER LEGISLATIVE SUCCESS, POSITIVE ECONOMIC NEWS, BUMP IN POLLS, DEMOCRATS' MIDTERM CHANCES APPEAR TO IMPROVE

Now, inflation has ebbed, prices at the pump have declined for two straight months, and last months job creation numbers, totaling more than half a million, took everyone in Washington by surprise. And instead of a strong bench of Republicans articulating a vision for the future, we are yet again only talking about Donald Trump.

Donald Trump leaves NYC post FBI raid on Mar-a-Lago resort (Felipe Ramales: Fox News Digital)

All of these factors, coupled with a series of big legislative wins for veterans health care, the CHIPs Act, and the Inflation Reduction Act provide a stark contrast for President Biden and the united Democratic Party compared with the scenes playing out on the Republican side of the aisle.

In the wake of the Mar-a-Lago search, former President Trump is rallying his base and forcing would-be rivals to go on the record that there was nothing wrong or illegal in taking classified documents, some of our nations most sensitive secrets, to his palatial country club estate in Palm Beach.

WASHINGTON POST COLUMN: MIDTERMS LOOKING MUCH BETTER FOR DEMOCRATS BECAUSE OF TRUMP

Literally overnight, all talk of potential GOP 2024 contenders appears to have evaporated leaving Republicans like Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, Sen. Ted Cruz and even Trumps one-time running mate, Vice President Mike Pence, scratching their heads and pledging fealty to the Don once again.

Even South Carolina Republican Sen. Tim Scott, who just published a book in anticipation of a potential presidential run, spent the majority of his time on cable news after August 8 answering questions about the Palm Beach raid instead of talking about his brand of politics and how he can take it national.

REPUBLICAN, DEMOCRATIC STRATEGISTS DEBATE OCTOBER SUPRISES FOR 2022 MIDTERMS

If you thought Donald Trump was no longer the head of the Republican Party, you lose. Republicans have rushed to defend their defeated standard bearer on dubious grounds and the former president is reaping all the political and financial benefits, while draining critical resources and attention from Republicans locked in tough races with less than 80 days until the midterm elections.

The day after the Mar-a-Lago raid, Trumps campaign team-in-waiting furiously emailed and texted supporters, raising over $1 million in just 24 hours. At the same time, the Senate GOP campaign arm announced that it was cutting back $13.5 million in ad spending across four key senate races.

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Any talk about Trump running again in 2024 or the potential of him announcing before the midterms, would likely drive turnout to be more like a presidential election year rather than a midterm cycle. While its true that Trump garnered more votes than any other Republican candidate in history, Joe Biden smashed all previous records by besting the incumbent president by more than seven million votes in 2020.

A midterm election, with a fired up electorate that looks more like 2018 or 2020, will benefit Team Blue in November. Plus any time spent talking about the former president, and not about inflation and rising costs across the board, helps down ballot Democratic incumbents and challengers.

Once again, while his endorsed candidates are floundering in the polls, Trump is in the drivers seat, reaping all the political benefits for himself while costing his party.

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As a Democratic operative, I am not worried about the prospects of Donald Trump running for president again.

In fact, as a campaign guy who wants to have a Democrat in the White House until 2028, I want him to be the 2024 Republican nominee. By taking up all the oxygen and raising money for himself while GOP senate challengers drop in the polls, its clear that the Mar-a-Lago raid winners are Donald Trump and Democratic prospects in November.

CLICK HERE TO READ MORE FROM KEVIN WALLING

Kevin Walling is a Democratic campaign strategist, former Biden 2020 campaign surrogate, vice president at HGCreative. Follow him on Twitter @KevinPWalling.

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Why Democrats have a good chance of winning the Mar-a-Lago midterms - Fox News

AMAC Exclusive By Claire Brighn

Beginning in earnest with Donald Trumps election in 2016, working class voters in the United States have fled the Democratic Party in droves, quickly eroding a once solid base of support for the party. Amid this seismic shift in the electorate, many elected Democrats and mainstream media pundits have over the past several months desperately tried to prop up this narrative of Democrats as the party of everyday Americans even as the policies emanating from Washington have grown increasingly opposed to their interests.

Following the 2016 election, many in media circles seemed to believe that Trumps performance with blue-collar and working class voters in states like Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Ohio must have been a fluke. Though 2018 was an electoral setback for Republicans in the House, 2020 quickly proved a continuation of the trend that began four years before. Analysis from The New York Times in 2020 on The Two Americas Funding Trump and Biden Campaigns found, for example, that in ZIP codes above [the median household of $68,703], Mr. Biden outraised Mr. Trump by $389.1 million. Below that level, Mr. Trump was actually ahead by $53.4 million. Additionally, the study also found that much of Bidens financial edge came from deep blue states along the coasts supporting the widespread perception of Democrats as the party of coastal elites. The donations mirror voting patterns, Republican pollster Whit Ayres noted at the time.

The reason why this shift is occurring is easy to see on issue after issue, Democrats policies are hopelessly out of step with the experiences of working class voters. On day one of his administration, Biden took actions like canceling the Keystone XL pipeline and ending oil and gas leases on federal lands policies favored by wealthy liberals, but which started a steady rise in energy prices that hit working class Americans particularly hard. Democrats $1.9 trillion American Rescue Plan, which was chock-full of woke priorities aimed at appeasing far-left activists, touched off an inflation crisis that has further devastated the financial lives of working class families. Instead of working to curb inflation, Biden and Congressional Democrats passed a bill dubbed the Inflation Reduction Act that economists believe will do nothing but increase inflation, and which contains subsidies for electric vehicles and solar panels more welfare for the wealthy. In just the past two years, every Democrat in Congress has voted for higher energy costs, ending coal, and unleashing an army of IRS agents on low and middle-income Americans.

Despite Democrats claims that these policies are targeted at working and middle class Americans, evidence suggests that the opposite is true. For instance, available data shows that 80% of electric vehicle subsidies end up going to individuals making more than $100,000 per year. A Wall Street Journal analysis of Californias push to switch to green energy sources, a plan similar to the climate provisions in the Inflation Reduction Act, showed that while working class households saw their energy bills increase, wealthy households actually saw financial gain from the policies.

Additionally, though Democrats slammed the Trump tax cuts as tax breaks for the rich and insist that their tax plan would make the wealthy pay their fair share, real wages grew under Trump, and that wage growth went predominately to workers at the lower end of the pay scale. Meanwhile, an analysis from the nonpartisan Joint Committee on Taxation found that the tax code changes in Democrats Inflation Reduction Act would result in an increased tax burden of more than $17 billion on Americans making less than $200,000 in 2023 alone.

Democrats struggles with working class voters are perhaps best captured in middle American states that were once reliably blue or purple but are now trending Republican. The state of Iowa, for instance, which for decades was the reliable wind vane of American politics, has all but totally rejected Democrats. Obama carried the state twice in 2008 and 2012, but Trump also won there twice gaining ground in 2020 over 2016. Since then, Republican voter registration has almost doubled in the state, and Bidens approval sits at a dismal 23%.

A similar story has played out in Ohio, which also voted for Obama twice, but which Trump won handily in 2020. Though Biden managed to carry Michigan, Wisconsin, and Minnesota two years ago, these once reliable bastions of Democratic support are now toss-ups.

In all of these states, which have been at the epicenter of the decline of American manufacturing in recent decades, working class voters are driving this shift, undoubtedly in large part thanks to Donald Trumps message of economic renewal and a return to American greatness.

In response, some Democrats have, to their credit, attempted to rebuild this base of support. A headline from The New York Times late last month asked: How Can Democrats Persuade Voters They Arent The Party of Rich Elites? In an apparent response, Senator Sherrod Brown of Ohio (D) wrote in an op-ed earlier this month, Were supposed to be the workers Party. Democrats must be that party again. (Never mind the fact that Senator Brown has garnered a reputation as one of the most far-left members of the Senate and was a strong supporter of Democrats spending binge.)

But this outreach effort has proven to be little more than lip service to the actual needs of working class voters. Far from re-calibrating their policy agenda as working class voters abandon them, Democrats appear poised to double down on their embrace of elite interests and a far-left social agenda, one that is completely at odds with the traditional values of most working class families. For Republicans, this presents a golden opportunity if they can follow Trumps lead and continue focusing on the issues that matter most to these voters.

Claire Brighn is the pen name of a conservative researcher and writer with previous domestic and foreign policy experience in the Executive Branch.

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Democrats Have Abandoned the Working Class - AMAC

COLUMBUS, Ohio A new campaign ad from Rep. Marcy Kaptur, the longtime Toledo Democrat whos running a tough race for re-election this year, would almost make you think its coming from a Republican.

It kicks off by calling out President Joe Biden for letting Ohios solar manufacturers be undercut by China.

But Marcy Kaptur is fighting back, working with Republican Rob Portman, protecting our jobs. Communist Chinas not happy, says the narrator for the ad, which references the Biden Administrations move in June to bar tariffs for two years on solar panels manufactured in Southeast Asia. The ad flashes a picture of Chinese President Xi Jingping for good measure before pivoting to criticize her Republican opponent, first-time candidate J.R. Majewski.

Kapturs ad is just the latest example of an Ohio Democrat this year, while running in political territory that Donald Trump won in both 2016 and 2020, trying to put daylight between themselves and Biden, as well as other national Democrats. Rep. Tim Ryan, a Niles-area Democrat whos running for Senate, also has taken pains to distance himself from Biden, including conspicuously skipping all three of the presidents visits to Ohio this year.

The strategy underscores Bidens low approval rating here, which polls consistently place in the mid-30s. But it also shows what Ohio Democrats think their best chance to win is in whats become an increasingly right-leaning state persuade some voters that theyre different than other Democrats.

Republicans, meanwhile, have signaled they once again plan to flood Ohio with ads tying the states Democratic candidates to Biden and other national Democratic figures.

Asked about the new ad on Wednesday, Kyle Buda, Kapturs campaign manager, said in a statement that the Toledo Democrat is happy to work with anyone to stick up for state workers.

They saw it when she fought against outsourcing with NAFTA, they saw it when she fought to protect and rebuild the American steel and auto industries, and theyre seeing it again as she leads the fight for an all of the above energy future, Buda said. No matter who is president, Marcy Kaptur will work with anyone Republican or Democrat to put Ohio workers first.

But Ohio Republicans say Kaptur, whos running in a redrawn district that Trump won by 3 points in 2020, is being disingenuous.

Both Kaptur and Ryan voted 100% of the time with Bidens legislative agenda, according to FiveThirtyEight, the data-focused political news website. Ryan ceremonially nominated Biden on behalf of Ohios delegation at the 2020 Democratic National Convention, while Kaptur also enthusiastically hit the campaign trail on Bidens behalf that year.

Marcy Kaptur and Tim Ryan pretending to be Republican shows you just how toxic the [Ohio Democrats] brand is, Justin Bis, executive director of the Ohio Republican Party, said in a Twitter post on Saturday. My prediction: it wont work! Democrat consultants behind these FAKE ads underestimate the average Ohio voter.

During mid-term elections, its not uncommon for candidates whose party controls the White House to try to distance themselves from the sitting president. Republican candidates did the same thing under ex-President George W. Bush and Trump, while Democrats did the same under then-President Barack Obama, according to Kyle Kondik, an Ohio native whos a political analyst for the University of Virginia.

But theres also a separate history of Democrats from more conservative areas of the country trying to differentiate themselves from their national, more liberal counterparts, with varying degrees of success, Kondik said.

In addition, within Ohios congressional delegation, Kaptur and Ryan are among the Democrats who for years have voted in a bloc against some international free-trade deals supported by Democratic and Republican presidents alike until Trump was elected in 2016. Both also used to support some abortion restrictions, although both have announced changes in their views in recent years.

Kaptur and Ryan are not voting with the Republicans a lot, if at all, whereas a generation or two ago you did have a fair number, Kondik said.

Ryan, a Youngstown Democrat whos tried to package himself to center-right voters as an independent voice, during a campaign stop in Columbus on Tuesday rattled off what he said were points of disagreement with Biden.

He, too, pointed to the solar tariff decision, which the Biden Administration said was meant to give domestic solar manufacturing time to ramp up, but which drew opposition from First Solar, which has three factories in the Toledo area, including an expansion with a planned 500 workers announced in 2021.

Ryan also said he opposed the Biden Administrations plans to end Title 42, a pandemic-era restriction imposed by the Trump administration that allowed the U.S. government to turn away people at the southern border on public-health grounds.

And on Wednesday, a spokesperson for Ryans congressional office told cleveland.com and The Plain Dealer that Ryan opposes Bidens plan to waive up to $20,000 in student loan debt for qualifying borrowers.

But, Ryan said Tuesday he does plan to attend a ribbon-cutting ceremony thats expected in the coming weeks to mark the upcoming construction of a massive Intel factory planned in the Columbus area. The White House has said Biden will be there, and Republican Gov. Mike DeWine and other elected officials also are expected to be on hand.

The project will be subsidized by the CHIPS Act, which Congress approved last month with bipartisan support and which Biden quickly signed into law.

Ryan missed the other Biden appearances earlier this year for what his campaign said were scheduling conflicts. In February, Ryan took a tour of a Columbus-area factory the same day Biden appeared in Lorain to tout the bipartisan infrastructure bill. In May, when Biden stopped in Cincinnati to push for Congress to advance the CHIPS Act, Ryan tweeted he had attended a funeral in Akron. And in July, when Biden touted a pension fix provision in Cleveland, Ryan spent time in Southeast Ohio, publicly sharing a photo from a restaurant outside Steubenville, where he met with local business owners, and a video from a brewery in Athens.

But Ryan told reporters he will move heaven and Earth to go to the ribbon-cutting for the Intel plant.

I have some disagreements with Biden, and those remain, but we were able to get this done. And thats a really big deal, Ryan said.

Nan Whaley, the former Dayton mayor whos challenging DeWine in this years governors race, has also skipped Bidens campaign events this year. But Courtney Rice, a campaign spokeswoman, like Ryan cited scheduling conflicts.

Nan is very focused, understandably, on Ohio and the Ohios governors race, Rice said. There is so much at stake, specifically in Ohio this November. And I would say she will welcome anyone who believes in her vision for Ohio.

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Ohio Democrats try to put daylight between themselves and President Joe Biden - cleveland.com

From Jan. 1, 2022, to the Aug. 16 primary, there was a 20 percent drop in Democratic voters. Republican voters jumped 10 percent, according to the Wyoming Secretary of States office.

Voting records dont specify how many individuals are registering for the first time versus switching their party, nor which party they are switching to. But anecdotally, Democrats in Wyoming have said they re-registered as Republicans to vote for Cheney in the primary.

Wyoming voters can change their party affiliation at least 14 days before the election or at the polls. Cheney included these instructions on her campaign site, and sent out mailers detailing the steps.

The change in voters was even more apparent beginning in July after Cheney began asking for Democratic support. From July 1 to the primary, Democratic registration dropped from about 43,000 to 36,000 a 15 percent decrease in just a little over a month. Republicans picked up nearly 15,000 voters in that span, increasing to a record-breaking number of 215,000 people registered by the primary.

And in the two weeks between Aug. 1 and the primary, Democrats lost over 3,000 voters, going from 40,000 to 36,000 registered Democrats the lowest its been in decades. Republican voters increased by almost 8,000 from Aug. 1-16.

Cheney wasnt the only lawmaker calling for voters to make a temporary switch for her. An organization called Wyomingites Defending Freedom And Democracy ran two ads from Democratic Reps. Dean Phillips (Minn.) and Tom Malinowski (N.J.) earlier this month urging Wyoming Democrats to vote for her.

You might be a little surprised that Id be supporting Liz Cheney in her bid to continue representing Wyoming in the U.S. House, Phillips said in his video. But principle must always come before politics, and nobody has shown more honor, integrity and courage than she.

Cheneys next steps include preparing for the launch of a new outside group dedicated to keeping Trump away from the presidency. The group, The Great Task, filed its switch from Cheneys candidate committee to a leadership PAC with the FEC in the early hours of Wednesday morning following her defeat.

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Democrats switched party registration in Wyoming. It couldn't save Cheney. - POLITICO