As of now the Democrats have 51 Senate seats in the win column. Alaska seems like a battle between two Republicans, with Lisa Murkowski the apparent winner, though with write-ins there’s no telling. That leaves Washington state and Colorado. At the moment, Patty Murray is about 14,000 votes ahead and Michael Bennet is about 8,000 votes behind. But there’s more to the story.

In both states the pattern of what votes still remain to be counted appears to favor the Democrat. It seems most clear in Colorado. There Boulder and Denver counties are just a bit more than half reported. And that’s where the blue votes come from. So it really looks like the math favors him. Indeed, if that’s really true, it seems hard to figure how Buck can hold on since the margin is so close right now.

I have less of a sense of the political geography of Washington state other than that King’s County (Seattle) is where the Dems get the lion’s share of their vote. But from what I’m hearing the math looks favorable to Murray there too.

If those both come into the Democratic column, it would mean that the Dems won each of the seats they were predicted to win. Basically, West Virginia, California and Washington, along with two they weren’t — Nevada and Colorado.

What’s got to be tantalizing for Dems is that they came pretty close in two other states — Pennsylvania and Illinois — but came up just short.

I said earlier this evening that while Republicans were outperforming predictions in the House, Democrats appeared to be doing the same in the Senate. That’s much less the case now that Giannoulias and Sestak went down to narrow defeats. But if the Dems hold on to 53 Senate seats that will be a decent showing relative to what a lot of people expected. Nate Silver noted earlier this evening that the Senate-House split that he’d somewhat discounted earlier seemed to be coming true.

So here’s a thought. Would Sharron Angle have gone down to defeat if she were a House candidate? Would Christine O’Donnell? I think Angle would have won, though O’Donnell’s so out there she may not have made it in a House race either. Similarly, Joe Miller? I don’t think he would have had a hard time in a House race. I think out of the 65 or so Republicans who won tonight you’ve got a number of Joe Millers and Sharron Angles.

There are lots and lots of House races. The candidates tend to get much less scrutiny than Senate candidates. Much less. There are just too many of them. We’ll need to get a much closer look at just who won and by what margins and so forth. But I think it’s a plausible explanation — possibly to be confirmed by a closer look at the numbers of the coming days — that the really wingnut Tea Partiers slipped through in the House because they didn’t get the kind of intense scrutiny the folks on the Senate side did. And vice versa.

Colorado seems to be moving back to Bennet (D). Buck’s lead is now down to 500 or so votes. And the votes that remain to be counted are from Democratic areas. So it looks like Bennet will pull ahead and then start opening up his own lead.

Whatever the merits of Evan Bayh’s arguments (in an oped in Wednesday’s Times), given that he walked away from a winnable Senate seat and held on to a $10 million war chest that other Dems could have put to good use, I think what most Democrats would like from Evan Bayh right now is for him to shut up.

It’s really not about his analysis. He just walked off the field in the middle of the game. Who can respect that? He just has no standing to talk.

It’s going to take a while to sort through all the carnage for Democrats in the House, but here’s a shocker: Rep. Jim Oberstar (D-MN), the 36-year incumbent and chairman of the Transportation Committee, has lost.

Oberstar is one of three House committee chairmen to go down, along with Rep. Ike Skelton (D-MO) of the Armed Services Committee and Rep. John Spratt (D-SC) of the Budget Committee.

The Minnesota governor’s race is not just too close to call, it appears destined to go to … a recount.

We took the big map down off the front page to give us room to bring you the full-breadth of day-after stories, but the full interactive scoreboard is still live and updating right here.

Three Senate races remain undecided this morning: Colorado, Washington and Alaska.

In Colorado, Democratic Sen. Michael Bennet has a lead of less than one half of one percentage point. But it appears the main outstanding uncounted votes come from areas where Bennet has been leading, in some cases by a lot.

In Washington, Democratic Sen. Patty Murray is up by a point.

In Alaska, the “write-in” candidate — a.k.a. Republican Sen. Lisa Murkowski — leads Republican nominee Joe Miller by seven points. How many of those are Murkowski votes — specifically, how many are ruled as votes for her — will be the key, but she has a sizable cushion to work with there. Call out the lawyers on this one.

Eric Kleefeld takes a closer look.

The Blue Dog caucus in the House was decimated yesterday, cut from 54 to 26 members.

Sip your coffee slowly while you catch up on the overnight results in the constantly updating TPM Midterms Wire.