With a little under six weeks to go until the election, our September 2024 US House update zeroes in on a few dozen races worth watching.
Thanks to political polarization, gerrymandering, and incumbency advantages, as we revealed in our current US House predictions, the number of seats in play in small. This is much like the number of electoral votes actively being chased by the two campaigns. The true playing field not being very big – somewhere between 50 and 100 seats out of 435 – and the number of seats needed to flip the chamber small – four – a handful of races will get a disproportionate amount of attention.
With our newest video, which replaces a prior update from the spring, we look at some of those key races and determine where the House will be won or lost.
September 2024 US House Update
In this production, we discuss a total of 39 House races which may be important on election night. States we rope into this preview are:
- Alabama
- Alaska
- Arizona
- California
- Colorado
- Illinois
- Indiana
- Iowa
- Louisiana
- Maine
- Maryland
- Michigan
- Nebraska
- New Jersey
- New Mexico
- New York
- North Carolina
- Ohio
- Oregon
- Pennsylvania
- Texas
- Virginia
- Washington
To see the Cook Political Report indices for each seat, visit their PVI website.
Who Is Going to Win The House in 2024?
As of now, this remains unclear. In 2022, the GOP thought for sure they would romp into control of the chamber, but they under-performed midterm averages for an opposition party and won just as narrow a majority as the Democrats had before them. With the chaos that has ensued, including a successful motion to vacate the chair, Democrats hoped that they would come right back, but the national mood is too divided, and the number of seats which swing might not be that big. As of now, we have both parties well over 200 seats, which means that whichever party wins will have a relatively small majority.
September 2024 US House Update: No Toss-Ups?
At this time, we have the GOP at 209 seats and the Democrats at 207. We are going to allocate the toss-ups based on our best guesses for the purposes of future comparison.
- Arizona: +2 Republican
- California: +2 Democratic, +2 Republican
- Colorado: +1 Democratic
- Michigan: +2 Democratic
- Nebraska: +1 Republican
- New Jersey: +1 Democratic
- New York: +2 Republican, +1 Democratic
- North Carolina: +1 Democratic
- Oregon: +1 Democratic
- Pennsylvania: +2 Democratic
- Washington: +1 Democratic
This gives us a no toss-ups projection of Democrats 219, Republicans 216, with flips in California, New Jersey, New York, and Oregon. This is subject to change and please forget you read this if incorrect. However, it highlights how small the margin of error is.
