So time for my final election prediction posts, there will be 3 (House, Senate, President).
Just to briefly review, I get my forecast by combining the analysis of 3 major experts (Charlie Cook, Larry Sabato and Stuart Rothenberg) plus the averaging of polls by Real Clear Politics.
I then tweak a little based on my own observations and run a series of scenarios,
Starting with the House, there is a 99.99% chance the House will remain Democratic (I’d say 100% but this is the year 2020)
There are 7 categories in the analysis: Safe Democrat/Republican, Likely Democrat/Republican, Leaning Democrat/Republican and Toss Up.
My averaged analysis shows 211 seats in the Save or Likely Democrat column vs 170 Safe or Likely Republican
There are 19 Lean Democrat and 14 Lean Republican and 22 tossups.
So Democrats only need 7 out of the 19 seats leaning their way to keep control.
My various scenarios assume everything from just toss up seats in play to all but safe in play and project even split to 2/3rds going either way.
Based on that the Democratic seats range from a low of 222 to a high of 251. The average is 238 seats.
My guess is Democrats will make modest gains, probably into the low to mid 240’s but not much more.
Even in a blue tide election you are going to see about 45% vote for Trump and accordingly 45% vote GOP for the House so it is unlikely Democrats would get much more than 55% of seats and that is 240 seats.
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