Briefing: The fight for the House of Representatives

A couple of weeks ago, I took a look at the tight battle for control of the United States Senate. This week: the House of Representatives. The fight for the lower chamber of Congress is much harder to assess. There are, after all, 435 individual contests — each with its own unique candidates, characteristics and electorate — compared to the 33 Senate races. At the moment, Republicans have a strong majority, holding 242 seats (if you include the Michigan one recently vacated by Thad McCotter) to the Democrats’ 193 (including two vacancies). After a terrible set of results in the 2010 midterms, the Democrats have a mountain to climb to retake control and reinstall Nancy Pelosi as Speaker.

The ‘generic Congressional ballot’ — where pollsters ask voters across the country which party’s candidate they’d vote for in their district — is currently exactly tied, according to the Realclearpolitics average. You might expect, therefore, that the two parties should be on to win roughly equal numbers of seats and therefore have roughly equal chances of emerging with a majority.