There is a growing sense among political observers that the United States may be heading toward a wave election in 2018. …
Despite these signs of an impending Democratic wave, however, many political experts believe that the way House district lines in many key states were drawn by Republicans prior to the 2012 election will make it difficult for Democrats to gain enough seats to take back control of the House. According to this argument, Republican gerrymandering was so effective that Democrats would need to win the national popular vote by a very large margin, perhaps eight points or more, in order to gain at least the 24 seats needed to take back the House.
In order to test this argument and evaluate how large a margin Democrats would need in the popular vote to win a majority of House seats, I conducted a regression analysis of the impact of the Democratic share of the major party vote on the number of Democratic seats in the House for all 36 House elections between 1946 and 2016. CONT.
Alan I. Abramowitz, Sabato’s Crystal Ball
Recent polls: Generic congressional ballot