For a long time, political pundits have been framing the 2022 Congressional Elections as the GOP's to lose. Their estimation of Democrats’ odds was quite low. Republican Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy was so bullish that year ago he said he'd bet his own house on a victory, and that there was no chance Democrats would win.
I run election forecasts at RacetotheWH, and when I started designing my 2022 House Election Forecast, I fully expected to find that Democrats had less than a 20% chance of winning and that Democrats were on pace to win 190 seats. However, while our analysis finds that McCarthy’s caucus is the favorite, Democrats have a much stronger chance at holding their majority than I expected.
Democrats’ chance of an upset is just north of 35% at launch. If they can improve their position over the next six months in the generic ballot by even one percent, they could be within striking distance of a surprise victory in November.
Democrats have benefitted from a series of fortuitous developments. Most importantly, this decade the congressional map will be far more competitive. Democrats have matched Republican gerrymandering in Texas and Georgia with their own maps in New York and New Jersey. The practice has drawbacks, as it reduces the number of competitive elections and means fewer voters are well represented, but the upswing for Democrats is that they no longer need to decisively win the national popular vote to take the House.
The current playing field in the House.
In the 2010s, they needed to win by around 3% to get the majority. Now it would likely require about a 0.5% lead. That will still be a challenge in 2022. History shows us that the party out of power in the midterms tends to perform quite well, and at launch (February 6th) Republicans have a 1.5% lead in the generic ballot.
This is big news for the 2022 election, but it's arguably even more important for the next decade. Now, it's going to be easier to win the House than the electoral college. If Democrats win the presidential election in 2024 or 2028, it will likely come with a Congressional Majority.
The House Forecast uses data to break down the political battleground, and estimates which races are likely to be the most competitive. Every day, it runs 20,000 simulations of the election to project how likely both parties are to capture the majority and win each race. It has a similar foundation as the Senate Forecast, which was one of the most accurate in the nation in 2020. It was closer to the final margin in predicting Senate races than Nate Silver's 538.
The House Forecast was tested on the over 2,000 Congressional elections held since 2010 to ensure it was as accurate as possible. It successfully called over 96.5% of those races correctly. Considerable work was also taken to ensure it had as little bias towards either party as possible. Despite running tests in a decade with two historic polling misses, it still only had a 0.13% bias towards Democrats on average when projecting the final margin of victory in each race.
RacetotheWH House Map — # of seats parties are projected to gain in each state.
The margin of victory for each Congressional district is projected using seven primary indicators:
1. The Voting History of Each Congressional District
2. The Incumbent’s Performance in the Last Election
3. Polling
4. Fundraising
5. Political Experience of the Candidates
6. National Environment
7. First Round of Elections (For States with Runoffs)
The House Election forecast is interactive, and includes detailed projections for each race. You can follow the latest updates here. We're also projecting that Democrats are the modest favorites in the Senate, thanks to a favorable map and their success at recruiting top-tier candidates to run relative to the GOP.