Forecasters

The forecasters tell you all year which seats are in danger and which aren't. Republicans got excited every time a seat moved toward them. Democrats dismissed each move, believing it wouldn't be that bad. Were they right? Below is a chart telling you exactly how often they're right. I included only seats where someone predicted it'd be a toss up or flip. There were 72 of those. If you want to add the remaining 363 as right, you can do so.

A number of forecasters leave seats in the toss up column. Every race has a winner. So picking "toss up" as your final prediction is wrong. And it's lame. You're saying the seat is too tough to call. So I divided the chart into districts everyone made a prediction, those four or five did, three did, and when it was just Larry Sabato and myself.


Everyone picked 26 contests correctly. It was the same in 2008. So you know that if everyone agrees that's what'll happen. The remaining 46 were tougher, but I'd say that both Larry Sabato and I did well. Real Clear Politics only picked 12 of those contests and went 7-5. They couldn't even pick well even when they excluded the hardest ones.

So Larry beat me. Not so fast. There are some districts still in doubt.


On each of them, those that picked agreed on six of them. I picked VA-11 different than Larry did. We'll see how that one turns out before declaring a winner.