The 2024 race to control the House is incredibly tight
The race for control of the House is on a knife's edge. With Republicans currently holding just a 221-to-214 majority (grouping vacant seats with their previous party), Democrats need only a four-seat net change in their favor to regain a one-seat edge in the House.
Given those narrow margins and the broader competitive political environment, 538's forecast of the House understandably gives each party just about a 1-in-2 shot of controlling the chamber after the 2024 election — making the race a true coin flip. Much like the presidential contest, the outcome here is very uncertain.
Digging into individual races, most seats in the House are uncompetitive, so the contests that will decide the House majority make up a very small proportion of the overall map. In 378 of the chamber's 435 seats, one party or the other has a better than 95-in-100 shot of winning, per the 538 forecast. Yet even among the 57 potentially competitive seats left, only some of those are likely to be that competitive, with the forecast viewing most as likely to go to one party or the other.
Ultimately, the universe of seats that will play the largest role in determining which party wins a majority includes 23 seats. In each of these contests, neither side has better than a 75-in-100 chance of victory — the forecast views each as a toss-up or as leaning only slightly toward one party or the other.
Republicans find themselves defending more of this battleground turf than the Democrats do, which is unsurprising given that they flipped a number of these seats in the 2022 midterm elections — nine of the 15 GOP-held seats on this list have incumbents first elected that year. Many of the most competitive seats the GOP is defending are also in "crossover" districts, where the party that holds the seat is different from the one that would have carried it in the 2020 presidential election. While 2020's presidential results of course may not be fully predictive of what we'll see in 2024, crossover districts matter because a seat's presidential vote is a strong baseline indicator of which direction the district is likely to lean, especially nowadays given our sharply polarized politics. Few House members win elections in districts that their presidential nominee didn't also carry in the same election cycle, with the total hitting a recent low of 16 seats in 2020 — just 4% of all 435 districts.