The Democrats have a 20% Chance of Holding the House
Kevin McCarthy should worry less about getting the vote for speaker and worry more about winning 218 seats
Note: More details and running updates here.
Everyone is assuming the Republicans will take the House. A few voices say there’s an outside chance that the Democrats get it, but everyone views that as wishful thinking.
Not so. There’s a 20% chance the Democrats pull this off. Here’s why.
I’ve split the remaining races into Democrat, Unknown, & Republican. These races have not been officially called but for example in CA-3 the Republican has 53% and the Democrat has 47% and they’ve counted 51% of the vote. That’s going Republican.1
In fact, CNN still has CO-8 listed as unknown when the Republican candidate in that race has already conceded. So CNN is being incredibly slow to call these races.
This looks at the remaining votes vs. the % difference between the candidates to place each in the appropriate category. And that gives us:
Democratic Win
AK, AZ-1, CA-9, CA-21, CA-47, CA-49, CO-8, ME-2, NM-2, OR-6, WA-3
Could go either way
AZ-6, CA-13, CA-22, CA-41
Republican Win
CA-3, CA-27, CA-45, CO-3, NY-22, OR-5
For the Democrats to hold the House they need to win all 4 of the truly undecided races. The thing is, all 4 of these are in California and in most every district in that state, as more votes are reported they almost always favor the Democrat.
Granted the Democrats need to run the board on this. AZ-6 is the biggest reach at present with a 6% spread, but only 51% of the votes reported. Whereas the closest is CA-13 with a difference of 0.2% and only 46% of the vote reported. And as always, one of the races I have listed as a win could flip. Very unlikely but it could happen.
If the four either way were each truly 50:50, then the odds of a Democratic sweep would be 6.25%. But it’s not 50:50. As I don’t know the details of each district and am generalizing like crazy, and because the Democrats need to win all 4 of the either way, I’m estimating the odds of the Democratic candidate catching up in AZ-6. I figure if that larger reach is achieved, the other 3 districts were a win.
My calling it 20% is likely off a bit (not sure which way). But there is a real chance of the Democrats pulling it off. And wouldn’t that be an amazing end to this election.
ps - Steven Pifer also sees a credible route to the Democrats holding the House.