Jessica Taylor and Erin Covey with Madeleine Brand | America Votes: The Battle for Congress

You've written that there are seven toss ups.

And before we get into each of them, I just want to get your overall sense of the chances that the Senate can actually flip to the Democrats.

Well, back in February of 2025, when we began this cycle, I wrote that Democrats' task to win back the Senate was Herculean, which now it is trending toward Democrats very slightly.

We still see the race for the Senate as a toss-up.

And as you mentioned, we have several races that will decide the majority there in our toss-up category, races in Iowa, Ohio, Alaska, Kansas, Maine.

We've moved.

The first one that I think will... will fall to Democrats as North Carolina from there, probably Maine and even Texas are next.

And then I think it comes down to that Iowa, Ohio, Alaska, Kansas contingency.

And Kansas is certainly the most surprising one that I've moved into the toss-up column most recently.

I did not think that We'll be talking about Georgia and North Carolina being off the board in Democrats column.

Michigan is and that is our other is our last toss up that Democrats are defending.

So we still have to watch that race certainly very closely.

But right now, our projection is that Democrats will pick up between two to six Senate seats.

So that could bring them up to 53 Senate seats, actually, if they flip up to the sixth.

We might revise that up in the coming weeks.

We're making decisions in real time as Aaron and I are both talking with sources and revising our estimates and different things.

But certainly the trend is moving in Democrats' direction when you look at certainly the inflation numbers today.

I had a call with a Republican strategist earlier this week, and I would I would describe their mood as morose just with the overall direction.

They have spent so much money.

Republicans certainly have the money advantage and they're trying but they're trying to shore up seats in Kansas and in South Carolina and in Nebraska.

You know, this the reason this map was so hard is because it requires Democrats to win at least two states that Trump carried by double digits.

But if this election is looking more like 2006, which I think it is, where you have an unpopular war, I think unpopular for very different reasons.

Voters are viewing this through an economic lens, not through a, you know, certainly a casualty lens, as we saw in the Iraq war.

But I found that in the competitive states there, when Democrats were able to flip states in Montana and Virginia and Missouri, They overperformed the previous presidential baseline by 13.6 points.

So states like Iowa and Texas that are 13 point states, Texas is 14, Iowa and Alaska are 13 point Trump states.