Sam Wang defends his House forecast against skepticism:
As I wrote this summer, models based on “fundamentals” (GDP growth, previous seat count, and so on) are research tools that set a range for what might happen before an election season starts. To make my favorite analogy to weather forecasting, they are like what climatologists do when they warn that there may be a lot of hurricanes next year.
However, “next year” has already started. And climatologists are not of use when one is trying to identify a hurricane strike zone. At this point the best indicator of opinion is…measurements of opinion. Polls are like a thermometer that tells us what is happening now. As I have pointed out, this is why econometric models for the Presidential race have been all over the place, yet our Meta-Analysis has been tightly clustered around a probable Obama victory since July.
The Dish 