Juan Williams’s column this week in the Hill hits an optimistic note:

There is still hope for Democrats to win the House majority!

Democrats picked up seats in 2012, he points out, and 30 of the House races they lost were by less than ten percentage points; the GOP brand is awful; and Obamacare hit 7 million enrollees. Alas, 2012 was a presidential election year — an Obama election year, at that; the GOP brand has rapidly recovered since last year’s shutdown fiasco; and Obamacare remains just as unpopular as it did before exchange enrollment looked pathetic. (He relays Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee chairman Steve Israel’s implausible hope that “the Republican budget [is going to] define the next seven months.”)

Which is why the Washington Post’s political-science blog, the Monkey Cage, said on Friday that there is effectively no chance of Democrats’ retaking the House. Here’s the results of a simulation they ran:

As you may have noticed, there are very very few scenarios in which Republicans end up with fewer than the controlling threshold of 218 seats — about 1 percent of the scenarios, in fact, a result that their model has produced since last December. The Monkey Cage simulation predicts the median scenario is that Republicans will gain about five seats, and there’s a 39 percent chance they get back to their 2010 position, with 242 seats. This simulation, of course, relies on today’s data, and things can change over the next seven months — President Obama’s approval rating could improve some, for instance. But Williams doesn’t really offer reasons why the situation is going to change — it’s a very good bet it won’t, or won’t do so enough to flip the House.