A tied poll in FL-27 leaves our forecast where it was

One new survey of Florida's 27th District has the race even. Bendixen & Amandi International, polling 600 likely voters from August 25 to 30 and reported by Politico, put Republican incumbent Maria Elvira Salazar at 45 percent and Democrat Eliott Rodriguez at 45 percent.

Our forecast did not move. The model gives Rodriguez an 11 in 100 chance of winning the seat and Salazar 89 percent, with a mean margin of R+11.4. The run immediately before this one, at 10:32 a.m. ET on September 14, had the same probabilities and the same mean margin; the only change was in the tails, where the 5th-to-95th percentile range shifted from R+26.6 to D+3.9 to R+26.7 to D+3.9. That is not a change in the race.

The distance between a tied poll and an R+11.4 mean is worth stating plainly. Our model does not read a single 600-voter survey as the race; it weighs the district's own fundamentals and the national environment alongside it. That environment currently favors Democrats: our generic-ballot average, built from 22 polls over the past 45 days, stands at D+6.8. Even so, the model's 90 percent range in FL-27 runs from a wide Republican win to a narrow Democratic one, and most of that range sits on the Republican side.

Nationally, our model gives Democrats a 95 percent chance of winning a House majority, with a mean of 241.1 seats against the 218 needed for control. One caveat is ours to own: our simulation correlates error nationally, by census division, by state and by district, but it has no term linking demographically similar districts wherever they sit. Without that cluster data, the House control number is marginally firmer than it would otherwise be.