The reason it’s counterintuitive is because you can’t really identify 23 districts that are safe bets to flip to Democrats, which is the number they need to take the House. In the Deluxe version of our model (the one I’ll be focusing on here) only 193 seats are considered by our model to be “solid Democratic” (at least a 95 percent chance of a Democratic victory). If Democrats won only those seats and no others, they’d actually lose two seats from the 195 they control now. Another 15 seats are “likely Democratic,” where Democrats have at least a 75 chance of winning. Win those as well, and Democrats are … still up to a net gain of only 13 seats.1

The model then has 34 seats between its three most competitive categories: “lean Democratic” (8 seats), “toss-up” (16 seats) and “lean Republican” (10 seats). If Republicans win 24 of those 34 seats — assuming everything else went to form — they’ll keep the House.

How hard is that? Because of the possibility of a systematic polling error, it isn’t really that hard at all. If there’s a typical polling error of 2 to 3 percentage points and it works in Republicans’ favor, the House would be a toss-up. We might not even know the winner for several days as everyone waits for additional mail ballots to be returned from California. Thus, the Lite forecast gives Republicans a 2 in 9, or 22 percent, chance of keeping the House based on the possibility of a systematic polling error. Their chances are 18 percent in Deluxe and 15 percent in our Classic version, meanwhile.