Forecasts: Republicans could keep the house. Here's how.



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Senate forecasts: Republicans will hold 51 seats (and will retain control of the Senate) at the next Congress, compared with 49 for Democrats. Nothing between Republicans holding 47 seats and 56 seats is in the margin of error.

Republicans are trying to stay the course in the House. They will probably not succeed. The forecasts I've created with Parker Quinn and Brice Acree currently give Democrats an advantage of 226 out of 209 points for Republicans after the mid-term elections.

Still, it's not as if all hope was lost for Republicans at this point. Indeed, I would point out that it is important to monitor the margin of error. It still gives Republicans a decent chance to stay in control.

Although we have not generally presented a percentage probability, the model gives Democrats about 72% chance of taking control of the House. This is one of the weakest chances that most models give, although this is in the general range. Do you know who else had about a 72% chance of winning? Hillary Clinton in 2016.

Indeed, it is not too difficult to describe a scenario in which Republicans keep control. Suppose the Republicans win all the seats where they are favored, as well as the seats where the Democratic candidate is leading about one point or less in our forecast. That would leave Republicans 220 seats to Democrats with 215 seats. Now, this is not the most likely scenario, but it is on the table.

You can also imagine a situation in which the ballot is deactivated. Assume that there is a systematic polling error and that the Democrats only win the popular vote of the House by 5 percentage points instead of the 8 votes that they are supposed to vote for. carry. That too could keep Democrats out of the majority. At the mid-point of 2014, such an error occurred.

The most intriguing is perhaps what happens if, traditionally, Republican voters who plan to vote Democrat decide, during the last days of the campaign, to vote after being Republican. There is no doubt that President Donald Trump hopes this will happen given the speech that he used last week to strengthen the foundation.

At the present time, we expect that 13 constituencies (including 9 with incumbent Republican MPs) will have Democratic Party preference, and average party politics weighed more than 8 points for Republicans.

This means that even in a national environment favoring Democrats, these are districts that, on average, would become Republicans. If the 11 districts currently on the verge of becoming democratic by 4 points or less go the other way, the Republicans would keep a simple majority.

Of course, it would be absolutely wrong to start from 2016 to assume that the forecasts underestimate the Republicans.

What we must remember is that forecasts can go both ways: favoring Democrats or Republicans.

In fact, I would say that it is slightly more likely that our forecasts underestimate the Democrats. My former colleague Nate Silver of FiveThirtyEight uses a "luxury" forecast model that gives Democrats 230 or 231 seats, depending on whether you use the "average" or "median" forecasts. In other words, looking at these data, it is likely that we are at the bottom of the range of estimates.
Moreover, if you look at the polls in this cycle, it is actually the Democrats who have outperformed their numbers, not the Republicans.

I suppose, however, that if our forecast is shifted by 9 seats and the already favored party does better (the Democrats), we will not remember it as sadly as an error in which the party that is Outsider (the Republicans) is doing better.

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