2018 Midterm Elections: Democrats Hold Nearly 75 Percent Chance To Win House, New Statistical Model Predicts

The 2018 midterm elections are only 75 days away, and with talk of Donald Trump’s possible impeachment heating up, there are serious questions about the Republicans retaining their majority in the House of Representatives. The Republican Party won a majority in the 2010 midterms and have held it ever since, but the Democrats have a chance to take back control, an event that could determine Trump’s future in office.

With a majority in the House, Democrats would also control the direction of numerous investigations into Trump’s activities, such as collusion with Russia, and the “hush money” payments to women who said they had sexual relations with him which the president’s former lawyer has said under oath that Trump ordered. Democrats are already preparing to bring Cohen in to testify before various House committees, if they win the House in the 2018 midterms, according to Vox.com.

Republicans now hold 236 House seats to 193 for the Democrats, with six vacant seats, as the Clerk of the House records. That means the Democrats must gain 25 seats to earn even a slim, one-seat majority in the House.

But the good news for Democrats, and bad news for Republicans and Trump, is that according to a new statistical model put together by the data analysis site FiveThirtyEight.com, Democrats currently hold a nearly 75 percent chance of doing just that.

FiveThirtyEight‘s model calculates that Democrats have a 74.4 percent chance of retaking the House, as of August 22, based on polling data and other “fundamentals” such as fundraising, historical trends, voting patterns in each individual district and other factors, FiveThirtyEight explains.

FiveThirtyEight founder Nate Silver added that the current chance of Democrats retaking the House are roughly the same odds that the site’s model saw for Democrat Hillary Clinton winning the U.S. presidency on the night of the 2016 election. In other words, though Democratic chances of retaking the House look likely, they are far from certain, and just as Trump was able to win the 2016 election, Republicans are just as capable of retaining control of the House.

The FiveThirtyEight model predicts that Democrats are most likely to win 34 seats in the House, giving the party a total of 229. But the model also gives Democrats a 10 percent chance of gaining at least 56 seats, a “blue wave” that would give the Democrats an unshakeable grip on the House. On the other hand, according to the new statistical model, Democrats have a 10 percent chance of gaining just 14 seats or fewer.