Nate Silver: GOP Will Gain 49 In House

Over at FiveThirtyEight, Nate Silver updates his forecasts today to predict that the GOP will pick up 49 seats in the House. That's far fewer than the 100+ being claimed by some Republican flacks, but still enough for the GOP to take the majority by six seats. Silver hedges his bets:

As I have warned repeatedly in the past, we believe that the uncertainty in the forecast is intrinsically quite high, stemming from the unusually large number of seats in play, and from differences of opinion among pollsters in how to calibrate their likely voter models to account for the so-called “enthusiasm gap.” There are only 170 seats that the model thinks of as “safe” Republican — those where their chances of winning are 95 percent or higher. However, there are only 151 seats that the Democrats are at least 95 percent assured of winning.

According to Silver, there's still about a 25% chance for the Dems to hold the House, a result which would, of course, depend on a strong turnout from Democratic voters. Hit the link for an interactive breakdown of each race by district.