Just yesterday, I noted that the national generic congressional ballot poll was looking better for Republicans, but not yet in the neighborhood of the 2010 or 2014 waves:
The Republican lead in the generic congressional ballot is 2.8 points (47.8 percent Republican, 45 percent Democrat), the biggest Republican lead since late June, but also not matching the GOP high-water marks of the first half of 2022. The Republican lead in the generic ballot is encouraging, but it trails where it stood at this point in 2014 (a 3.4 point lead) or 2010 (a 6.9 point lead). Notably, Republicans underperformed the generic ballot in the 2018 Democratic wave by 1.1 points and overperformed it by 3.3 points in the 2014 Republican wave, although they underperformed by 2.6 points in the 2010 Republican wave. In the last three presidential elections, by comparison, Republicans overperformed the generic ballot by 3.7 points in 2020 and 1.7 points in 2016, but underperformed it by 1.4 points in 2012, in each case reflecting presidential-year turnout factors that are absent in the midterms. In short, the generic ballot is likely to be off a few points this year — we can’t predict in which direction — but it is likelier to underestimate Republicans both because of a tendency to favor Democrats and because wave turnout tends to run ahead of the general poll.
Well, a few more polls have come in since then to push that lead up to 3.3 points, and the trend is starting to look like the hard break of a red wave:
This is the point at which skeptics may quibble that the poll averages are reflecting particularly favorable pollsters, but consider: Six of the ten pollsters whose polls currently comprise the RealClearPolitics average also released generic ballot polls taken in late September or early October. Five of the six showed movement towards the GOP, and the sixth (Trafalgar) was already there:
