Right now, the Democrats control the House with 219 Democrats versus 211 Republicans (there are five vacancies).

It takes 218 votes to control the House. This means if the Republicans hold the seats they have and pick up just seven seats from Democrats, they will control the House.

Will this happen? The 2022 election cycle is more challenging to predict than usual because it's the first election since the 2020 Census that the House map had redrawn to reflect population gain or loss on a state-by-state basis.

Texas gained two House seats, while Colorado, Florida, Montana, North Carolina and Oregon gained one each. The losers were California, Illinois, Michigan, New York, Ohio, Pennsylvania and West Virginia, which lost one seat each.

The new district maps favor Republicans on the whole. Another factor favoring the Republicans is that voters often turn back to the party opposing the incumbent president, either out of dissatisfaction with their presidential choice or simply to balance the scales in ways that keep any one party from becoming too powerful.

The average loss for the president's party in a first-term midterm since 1982 was 30 seats. If that were the only information I had, my forecast would be that the Republicans would gain 30 seats this November. That would put the House at 241 Republicans and 189 Democrats, a solid 47-seat majority.

Interestingly, a RealClearPolitics forecast based on the average of numerous polls has a forecast of 219 Republicans and 182 Democrats, with 34 seats in the too-close-to-call category.