While the battle at the top of the ticket has dominated the news this election cycle

there are several key down ballot races that could shift the balance of power in

Congress. The majorities in the House and Senate are razor thin. While

Republicans in the House have a five seat majority, Democrats in the Senate

hold on by only two seats. All of this could change with several toss-up races come

November. Amy Walter of the Cook political report with Amy Walter has been

tracking all of this very closely and joins us now. Great to see you.

Hello. Hello, hello. It's been so long since Great to see you. Hello, hello, so...

It's been so long since I've seen you.

A mere minute.

So let's start with the Senate because Cook Political has four Senate races listed as toss-ups in this election cycle. That's Montana,

Nevada, Michigan, and Ohio. These are all currently Democratic-held seats.

So what are you watching here? What we're seeing is overall, this is the map and the reality of the map has been that Democrats

have to defend many more seats than Republicans overall and in fact all of the competitive seats this year

seats that we consider to be competitive are Democratic held seats and as you pointed out

Democrats can really only afford to lose two seats.

More important though, it's actually one seat if they don't win the President's seat.

If they lose one seat, it's a 50-50 Senate and a Donald Trump victory would mean that

Republicans then have control of the Senate.

Coming into the cycle, Democrats knew what the map looked like. They were aware of how

challenging this would be and they had really three priorities. One was that

they were hoping that Republicans would have bruising, competitive, difficult primaries and would nominate

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