Carl Klarner has put out his formal forecast of state legislative elections for this election. He produced this spreadsheet showing current party control numbers in each chamber plus his forecast. You can read his summary here and his related post at the Monkey Cage here.
Last month, I ran a pretty simple model suggesting that Republicans would pick up 13 chambers across the country. My predictor variables were limited to national income growth, the president’s approval ratings, and the number of chambers the president’s party currently controls. Klarner’s model is a lot more sophisticated, looking at details for each legislator and district, including incumbency, previous vote shares, state economic indicators, and more. However, he comes to roughly the same outcome as I did, with Republicans picking up 14 chambers. Those chambers are:
Colorado House and Senate
Iowa Senate
Kentucky House
Maine House and Senate
Minnesota House
Nevada House
New Hampshire House
New Mexico House
New York Senate
Washington House and Senate
West Virginia House
I don’t know enough about most of these individual chambers to affirm or challenge Klarner’s forecasts, but I applaud him for coming up with a transparent forecasting method and putting it out there to test. We’ll know more soon.
[Cross-posted at Mischiefs of Faction]
