With only a handful of races left to call, NBC News has run the numbers, calculated the odds, and has predicted the final outcome of the battle for the majority in the House of Representatives with 99.5% confidence.
“Though NBC News cannot project control of the House at this time, the Decision Desk has released its estimate for the U.S. House of Representatives as a whole, which reflects the most probable outcome for partisan control,” the network reports.
“To arrive at the House Estimate, the NBC News Decision Desk calculates the probability of a Democratic, Republican or third-party victory in each of the 435 individual House races based on pre-election research. On election night, election analysts examine all the available vote data in real time, adjusting the probabilities for each House race accordingly,” the network explains.
Based on all of these factors, NBC News’ Decision Desk then “calculates the most probable outcome for control of the chamber and provides a margin of error plus or minus the number of seats that could still be won by either party” and thus projects that the GOP will control of the House with a 219-seat majority.
This is obviously not a final or official projection, nor is it one that the GOP can particularly boast about. Still, political strategists on both sides of the aisle agree that the GOP will eke out a victory. Democrat strategists told ABC News it would take a “miracle” for their party to win enough of the uncalled races to win the majority — though a path remains possible.
“From the math that we’ve done — I think it’s a foregone conclusion [that Republicans take the House],” Sarah Chamberlain, the president of the Republican Main Street Partnership group, told ABC News. “But it’s gonna be very close. It’s gonna be just a couple of seats. And it shouldn’t be. I mean, this should have been a landslide, frankly.”
A 219-seat majority would be pathetic but enough to thwart Biden’s legislative agenda. Last year, the Democrat-controlled House passed the Freedom to Vote Act, the John R. Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act, and the For the People Act. Thankfully, they failed to get the bills passed in the Senate. The Senate could end up with a 50-50 or a 51-49 Democrat majority, which means that our best hope to thwart these federal election takeovers is a GOP majority in the House. 219 seats may not be much, but I’ll take it.
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