"Sleeper" House Seats

[Filuwaúrdjan]

In a normal election* there are always results which cause a shock to most observers. Usually if you're good at watching elections and sufficiently obsessive about them you can spot most of them in advance, though chances are you'll never spot everything going on.

That's a 'yes', by the way.

In addition to the obvious stuff, cinyc's theories are worth paying attention to. They are extremely partisan, of course and are quite likely to be meaningless, but we should not forget that the poster that called the scale of 2006 with the most accuracy was Scoonie; equally partisan but for the other side. Just a thought.

*The essentially static pattern of House races in the early 2000s was not normal by either international or historical American standards. It's actually quite unusual for so little to shift and for so many seats to be so utterly safe.