Biden Is Projected To Be The President-Elect. Here’s How It All Went Down.

In the 2018 midterm elections, the central question was whether Democrats would be able to take back the House. And the end result was Democrats flipped 41 seats, riding a big blue wave right through America’s suburbs. Now the question is, can they hold onto that majority?

The answer here is: Yes. Democrats are clear favorites, according to the final version of FiveThirtyEight’s House forecast, which gives them a 97 in 100 chance of winning control of the House.

House Republicans face stiff odds. They need a net gain of 17 seats to reach a majority, which is a lot of House seats to pick up in a presidential cycle. And in addition to that, the overall national environment just doesn’t favor Republicans. That’s maybe the biggest reason why Democrats are favored to keep control of the House — as well as maybe win the White House and even the Senate.

Our forecast shows Biden with a considerable lead. But what would happen if 2020 saw the same type of polling error as we saw in 2016? Galen Druke guides us through the electoral map:

Due to the COVID-19 pandemic, mail-in ballots are going to make up a significant chunk of ballots cast this election. One particular concern that some have with the integrity of mail-in voting is the potential for voter fraud from ballots harvested from deceased voters. Recent research from political scientists at Stanford University shows that ballots cast by deceased people are extremely rare. Over the course of 2011-18, the study’s authors found that only 14 of these sorts of ballots have been cast in the state of Washington (where the authors have unique data suitable to test this claim, since the state regularly conducts all-mail elections). This is consistent with other work showing that double-voting is extremely low, and that measures commonly used to address it mistakenly throw out 300 legitimate votes for each double vote detected.