Silver: All MN House seats largely safe, but three have a slight chance of changing hands

WASHINGTON — FiveThirtyEight founder Nate Silver’s new House forecasting model projects that, while Republicans are favored to take the House, every Minnesota seat is safe this year. Further, the best chance any individual seat has of flipping is a scant four percent.

Silver allowed MinnPost a look at his model forecasts for Minnesota, including the percentage chances of victory and predicted vote. The model assumes a generic Republican advantage of 8 points, factors in safety rankings from outlets like the Cook Political Report and CQ Politics (both of whom I’ve cited repeatedly) and includes any polls available.

What his forecast finds in Minnesota is that every seat is safe, though three of them (MN-01, MN-06 and MN-07) produced at least a one percent chance of takeover. That’s based on 100,000 computerized election simulations.

According to Silver, Minnesota’s 1st District (Tim Walz vs. Randy Demmer) is the most likely in the state to flip party control, with the GOP having a four percent chance of winning the seat. Surprisingly, Silver rates the 7th (Collin Peterson vs. Lee Byberg) as second likeliest at two percent above the 6th (Michele Bachmann vs. Tarryl Clark) at one percent.

Source: Nate Silver, New York Times

Note: Odds are the rounded percentage of 100,000 election simulations that result in a given candidate winning. (i) = Incumbent

Further reading on this topic:

Silver: G.O.P. Has 2-in-3 Chance of Taking House, Model Forecasts

Our Eric Black: Nate Silver predicts Repub takeover of House

Criticism of Silver’s model from the Votemaster at Electoral-vote.com, who developed his own model that predicts an upset win for the Democrats in MN-03 (Erik Paulsen vs. Jim Meffert), a toss-up in MN-06 and safe races for Walz, Peterson and the rest of the delegation.