James Pethokoukis

Certainly the “whisper estimate” for Democratic House loses is now 50+ with plenty of upside risk. But my pal Andy Roth at the Club for Growth thinks the upside number could be quite large, indeed:

I’m tracking four of the prognosticators who rate House races — Cook, Rothenberg, Sabato and CQ.

There have been some updates since my last blog post, so I thought I’d update my rankings of Democratic seats in play.

Between the four an incredible 104 Democratic seats are in play, up from 103.  I think there are a few more seats that will come into play over the coming weeks.

– 36 (was 26) seats are very slightly to strongly leaning Republican.

– 21 (was 16) are pure toss ups to very slightly tilting Democratic.

– 29 (was 25) are leaning Democratic

That means an incredible 77 seats are very seriously in play.  Now, in fairness, I did change the methodology slightly.  I’m now using the most aggressive prognosticator.  I’m doing this because updates are slow in coming and the first one to call a race more competitive seems accurate.

Another 27 seats are rated likely Democratic but at least one of the four, and in 15 cases two or more of the prognosticators.