I’m sure a lot of Democrats think Charlie Cook is a cruel tease right now:

It appears that the signs of a possible Democratic rebound were just a false alarm. After almost a year of unrelentingly bad poll numbers, back-to-back weeks of Gallup Polls showing Democrats with eyebrow-raising leads might have just been statistical flukes. For the weeks of July 12-18 and July 19-25, the Gallup Organization’s weekly aggregation of daily tracking polls showed Democrats ahead among all registered voters on the generic congressional ballot test question 49-43 percent and 48-44 percent, respectively. Each poll of more than 1,500 registered voters had 3-point error margins. In the 21 weeks since Gallup began asking the generic ballot test question daily, releasing the aggregate numbers once a week, the two parties have averaged a tie. Importantly, this tie is among all registered voters, which tends to not correspond to actual turnout numbers, and certainly not in midterms, which tend to skew Republican.