Number of Competitive House Races Doubles from Recent Years (Nate Silver)

[onehandle]

Source: New York Times

The House forecast that we released on Friday establishes an over-under line for Republican gains at a net of 47 or 48 seats. But, as I noted at the end of the article, the confidence interval on this forecast is very wide. Its margin of error is about ±30 seats — meaning that a gain of as few as 17 seats, or as many as 78, is entirely possible — and there is a small chance of even larger or smaller gains.

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Currently, the folks at Cook Political consider a total of 87 House races to be either toss-ups or to merely “lean” toward one or the other party. This is an unprecedented number in recent history. At a comparable point in the past six election cycles — that is, with about 25 days to go until the election — Cook Political had put the number of highly competitive races at between 34 and 56; this year’s figure is roughly twice as high.

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So, if you force it to pick an number, our model projects a Republican gain of about 48 seats (that projection could change, of course, by Election Day). But because of the high amount of uncertainty intrinsic to the forecast, I couldn’t really take any great dispute with a model that made a “best guess” of 56 seats, or 37 seats, instead.

I’ll acknowledge that this puts us in a somewhat awkward position. We’ll probably get a lot of credit if we make a “best guess” of a gain of 48 Republican seats, and they in fact win 47, or 50 — or 48 exactly. But really, we think the value the model provides to New York Times readers is that it is smart enough to know what it can’t and doesn’t know.

Read more: http://fivethirtyeight.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/10/10/number-of-competitive-house-races-doubles-from-recent-years/?hp

[robcon]

1. We're in trouble; Boehner is an ass.

n/t