Prognosticators' Forecasts

Now that the Hill has revealed their ratings, we have five prognosticators out there. They are Rothenberg, Sabato, Cook, Roll Call, and The Hill.

So how do they see things coming out?

I used my standard system

Safe - 1
Like - .8
Lean - .6
Toss - .5

The left has how my ratings shook out and the middle has how the average of the five prognosticators ended up. To make it easier, I rounded to the nearest half congressional seat. Cook reports in halves. So that seemed okay. 3.5 seats isn't a big difference, so I'm comfortable with my picks.


Then I decided to move every rated, non-safe, seat one rating to the left. e.g. Toss to Lean Democrat. Since a toss-up would be +0.5 and a Lean Democrat would be rounded to +0.5, the numbers sometimes didn't change. Moving everything one tick left would mean Democrats would pick up 23.5 seats. Still not enough.

There are, however, 15 half seats in there. No one can win half a seat. So if you award 9 of those half seats to the Democrats, you'll have their net 25.

Right now I don't see the House in play. If the environment gives the Democrats a noticeable advantage, it definitely is. We're not talking about 2008 55.6% or even 2006 54.1%. I think the Democrats would need to corral around 52% of the vote for this to happen.