Just think: if the New York Times had been willing to play ball with Nate Silver, they could have things of this quality—rather than more of their standard politician-celebrity-gossip and "Javanka are going to save us all" that has done so much to empower the Orange-Haired Baboons of the world: Nathaniel Rakich: 538 Election Update: How Our House Forecast Compares With The Experts’ Ratings: "FiveThirtyEight’s forecast is a tad more bullish on Democrats’ chances overall than the three major handicappers...
...If you assign probabilities to their race ratings, Cook’s and Sabato’s ratings both imply a Democratic gain of 29 seats, while Inside Elections’s compute out to a Democratic gain of 23. (Our forecast, remember, currently projects an average Democratic gain of 34 seats.) The Democratic tail is also longer in our Classic forecast — that is, the model gives a greater chance than the experts do that a blue wave turns into a tsunami and Democrats pick up a ton of seats, like 60 or 70. That’s because the model rates fewer seats as truly safe for Republicans... than the experts do. By a small margin, our forecast also places more seats in the “solid Democratic” category and all the competitive categories combined (between “likely Republican” and “likely Democratic”).
Who will be right? We honestly don’t know! We’re still 11 weeks out from the election, and things are still subject to a lot of change. The long tails in our forecast reflect that, but it’s worth noting that there’s no real way for the qualitative ratings to communicate uncertainty. The bottom line is that, in the big picture, and in terms of average seat gain, all the major forecasters agree: Democrats are mild favorites to take back the House...
#shouldread
