But digging deeper, beyond the national numbers, reveals at least a few glimmers of hope for Democrats — still fairly distant and faint, but bright enough to get campaign strategists scanning the horizon and weighing the odds.

That is because different parts of the country are recovering at different rates — and, in a bit of electoral good luck for the Democrats, some of the areas that are beginning to edge upward more quickly, like parts of Ohio, Pennsylvania and New York, happen to be in important battlegrounds for the House and the Senate.

“A lot of the trend lines are turning positive in many of these contested areas,” said Mark Zandi, a chief economist for Moody’s Analytics. “It really boils down to: Is there enough time for the trend lines to trump the still pretty difficult conditions in the minds of the voters?”…

While much attention has been paid to the nation’s stubbornly high unemployment rate, political scientists have found little correlation between that measure and midterm elections results. Instead, they have found more broad-based indicators, particularly real personal disposable per capita income, which measures the amount of money a household has after taxes and inflation, to be better gauges.