Professors Robert Erikson, Joseph Bafumi (Dartmouth) and Christopher Wlezien (Temple) have run 1,000 simulations of the 2010 House elections in order to estimate the number of House seats Republicans will gain in 2010.
In The Huffington Post, Bafumi, Erikson and Wlezien explain that the model they used to successfully forecast the 2006 midterm election predicts a 50-seat loss for the Democrats, resulting in a Republican majority of 226 seats to 206 seats. Taking into account the uncertainty in their model, the researchers find the Republicans have a 79 percent chance of winning the House in 2010.
Using a two-step technique summarized in The Huffington Post, the model first predicts vote division from the generic poll result and the party of the president. It then forecasts the winners of 435 House races using separate statistical models for open seats and races with incumbent candidates, taking into account at each step uncertainty about the inputs.
The preliminary forecast will be presented at the 2010 Annual Meeting of the American Political Science Association and published, with other forecasts, in the October 2010 issue of PS: Political Science.
