Forecasting U.S. House Elections: Democrats Gain 1 Additional Seat

… We developed a model that includes two types of fundamentals: 1) national factors like the economy that affect every race to some extent, and 2) district-level factors like whether an incumbent is running for reelection. We then ran this model for all House elections from 1952 through 2010, and predicted 2012 from that.

The bottom line: our model predicts Democrats will win 194 seats (44.6%), one more than they currently hold, with a one in four chance that they will take back the House. [cont.]

Eric McGhee, Public Policy Institute of California (The Monkey Cage)