NBC's politics desk greets Democrats' first Kansas Senate shot since 1932 with a gut check.

…(cont) Cook moved Kansas again. Didn't just confirm it — moved it further, this time grouping it with North Carolina and New Hampshire, and the wire copy on that one says, and I'm reading this straight off the page, "Democrats have stronger odds than previously estimated." Stronger. Than previously estimated. Previously being thirteen days earlier.

Same morning, CBS News put out its own list — ten Senate races, forty-two House races, the ones they say will decide who runs Congress. Kansas is on it, because Kansas is apparently where a Republican seat held since before most of us were born is now a coin flip. Nineteen thirty-two is the last time a Democrat won that seat. I had to read that twice. The polling they're citing has Hamilton and Marshall in what the wire calls a dead heat.

Same day, over in Pennsylvania, the Speaker of the House is in Bethlehem — that's a real place, not a metaphor, though I understand how it reads — on his seventh trip this cycle to a district he's calling one of his "top three" battlegrounds. Top three. Not top one. Not "we're fine." Top three, and he flew out there himself to say so.

And the same week — I checked the dates twice on this one, because this is the part where I start talking to the dog — NBC's own politics desk, not a competitor, not an opposing outfit, their own people, published a piece telling Democrats they need what the headline calls a "gut check." Same week as the forecasts moving. Same week as Kansas flipping for the first time since Hoover was president. A gut check.

I'm not an election man. I stand in whatever line they put me in at the bank, same as anybody, and I've learned not to trust a line that tells you it's moving fast while it isn't moving at all. What I've got, written down, dated: two forecasters, one day apart, pointed the same way; the same seat moved again thirteen days later, further in that direction; a seat that hasn't flipped since the Depression; a Speaker naming his own top three; and underneath all of it, the same week, from inside the party supposed to be catching the good news — a gut check.

Oh — one more thing, before you go. I almost left this page folded over. The forecaster saying the odds got stronger is the same one who publishes the range those odds sit in: two seats to six. It takes four to flip the majority. Does two get you there?