Eleven weeks from today, we will be going through the smoking rubble of the mid-term elections, figuring out why one party stayed in power, lost their grip in Congress or both.

So let's take a snapshot of where things stand right now in Election 2010.

First, let's start in the Senate, where Republican chances of taking over that chamber are certainly a longshot.

Don't get me wrong, I like longshots when I bet on horse races.  But they are longshots for a reason, and don't always come in first.

Republicans would need to pick up eleven seats to take over control of the Senate, and numbers like that do not occur very often in a single election.

Conventional wisdom around the Capitol complex is that Republicans could stand to gain a half dozen, maybe more, seats in the Senate in November.

But the GOP also has to hold on to a couple of seats that will be hotly contested, like Florida, Missouri and Kentucky.

One final statistic from my research - neither party has won more than nine Senate seats in one election since the Democrats won 16 Senate seats in 1958.  The Republicans last did it in 1946, when they grabbed an extra thirteen seats.

In the House, Democrats currently hold an advantage of 255-178, with two vacancies.  Those seats could be split, so for the sake of argument, we'll say it's an edge of 256-179.

That makes forty seats the magic number for Republicans to win in November, if they are going to take control of the House of Representatives.

The last time one party won more than 40 House seats in an election was 1994, when Republicans picked up 54 seats as they took charge of the House.  For the Democrats, the last time was 1974, the post-Watergate election, when they won added 49 seats.  Republicans also won 47 in 1966 and Democrats won 49 in 1958.

Those were all mid-term election years.

So, could it happen?  Sure it could.  And just as easily, Republicans could fall short as well.

Eleven weeks and counting.  I'm already doing my homework for Election Night.