Democrats Favored to Pick Up Snowe Seat
FiveThirtyEight - Nate Silver's Political Calculus
February 29, 2012
Democrats Favored to Pick Up Snowe Seat
There have been some comparable cases in the recent past, but most were on the Democratic side, in particular the retirements of Senator Byron Dorgan of North Dakota and Senator Evan Bayh of Indiana in 2010, and the pending retirement Senator Kent Conrad, also of North Dakota, in this cycle.
Ms. Snowe’s retirement levels the playing field a bit. When we last took an overview of the Senate in December, I gave Republicans a 15 percent chance of losing Ms. Snowe’s seat. Even that 15 percent, however, was not an estimate of Ms. Snowe’s chances of losing in a head-to-head matchup against a Democrat; she remains popular in Maine and easily won re-election there in a difficult election cycle (2006). Instead, it was a hedge against the possibility that Ms. Snowe would retire or succumb to a primary challenge, precisely because the consequences of this would be so damaging to Republicans.
Maine, while idiosyncratic, is a blue-leaning state, enough that you would expect Democrats to have an edge there in an average election cycle in a contest between “generic” opponents.
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Full article here: http://fivethirtyeight.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/02/29/democrats-favored-to-pick-up-snowe-seat/?utm_source=twitterfeed&utm_medium=twitter
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That ups my projection for Dem pickups to 3 seats with no losses, but I'm an optimist. 
Massachusetts
Nevada
Maine
...Maine has just been waiting to go blue in the Senate. It will be interesting to see how Susan Collins plays all this. But I don't anticipate a real Republican challenge.
I had previously put Indiana as a tossup, but Richard Luger is running, again. North Dakota is going to be real tight as is Nevada, but there I think we'll leg it out. ND is unpredictable. Nebraska is going to be real interesting, but I think with Kerrey running we've got a real chance of keeping the seat. We won't lose in Montana with Tester, George Allen in VA is a joke, and Arizona is in never-never land.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Senate_elections,_2012
Matt at DCW hasn't posted a Senate Forecast since early January, it will be interesting to see the 'next' one - hopefully he'll post a new one soon (if he doesn't in the next couple of weeks I'll email him to ask him to do an update)
Here's the January version: http://www.democraticconventionwatch.com/diary/4989/2012-dcw-senate-forecast
...is reluctant to be too bold in their estimations, and forget how Dems won in Nebraska and North Dakota in the first place!