Published online by Cambridge University Press: 14 January 2011
The “Seats in Trouble” forecasting model predicted in mid-August that Republicans would gain a landslide number of seats in the 2010 elections to the U.S. House of Representatives, and that this number would be sufficiently large to restore their majority control of the House, which was lost in the 2006 midterms. Republicans were predicted to gain approximately 51 or 52 seats, about the magnitude of their 1994 midterm victory and the largest seat change since the Truman-Dewey election of 1948. As predicted, on Election Day, Republicans won a landslide number of seats, enough to give them a substantial House majority.
1 The forecast was originally presented at the American Political Items Collectors Convention in Buffalo, New York, on August 6, 2010. An August 29, 2010, story by Robert J. McCarthy in the Buffalo News reported the forecast, which was picked up the next day by the Drudge Report (“Professor Predicts House Will Go to Republicans,” August 31, 2010).