2010 House Forecast - 1/27/10 Update

by: Matt

Thu Jan 28, 2010 at 13:00:00 PM EST

Welcome to the latest edition of the 2010 DemConWatch House Forecast, a summary of the best House forecasts.

House Forecast: 242.4 (-14.6), a huge drop from the last forecast on Oct 9, (253.8 (-3.2)). Yet at this point, Democrats would be ecstatic with only a 15 seat loss, in the face of overall forecast losses of 24-28 seats, 25-35, or even 40 seats. 

So why are there differences between the seat-by-seat forecasts and the macro forecasts?

One reason is that the seat-by-seat forecasts give a lot of weight to incumbency. Dave Wasserman, who does the House Forecasts for Cook Political Report, told DCW:

Our ironclad policy is at Cook is to never rate any unscandalized incumbent any worse than a tossup.

Another reason is that there's an assumption that the GOP momentum will continue. A look at the 2008 chart on the right shows why there's a good deal of validity to this assumption.

The scary thing, of course, is that at this time in 2008, there was no wave forecast. It built up slowly all year long, with most of the gains coming in October '08. A similar knee in the curve in 2010 would mean a loss of unprecedented size.

Maybe Obama's speech last night is the start of a turnaround? We shall see.

(See the latest Senate Forecast here)

Methodology after the break.

The House Forecast is an average of the projections of the Democratic held seats in the 2011 House.

For CQ and Rothenberg, he House Forecast for each source gives Democrats 1.0 seats in a race that is projected Solid/Likely (D)  for the Democrat, 0.8 seats for a Democrat-Lean (DL), 0.5 seats for a a Tossup (T), 0.2 seats for a Republican-Lean (RL), and obviously 0 seats for a solid/likely (R) Republican seat. At that request of Cook Political Report, we are now counting their Leans at .65, and their Likelys at .8. Although we don't differentiate between the Likelys and the Solids in the chart, the number for Cook does reflect their percentages.

The House seats are sorted by the likelihood of the seat being won by a Democrat, so the most solid Democratic seats are at top, the most solid Republican seats are at the bottom, and the Tossups are in the middle. Only those seats that have at least one of the rankings showing the seat as Lean or Tossup are shown.