More Than 100 Seats in Play?

Yesterday I posted 10 Reasons Why the Democrats Should be Very, Very Afraid.  Here's another one, this analysis coming at the end of a long post by Brad Todd at NRO:

With much work yet to be done, the path outlined above could put John Boehner well past the 39 seats he needs to put Pelosi on a back bench — but the worst news for Democrats is that those races are just the beginning of their problems. As the August recess wore on, dozens of Democrats who thought they were safe went home to find themselves surprisingly in trouble. Aside from the 60 races in Democrat-held seats above, there are three or four dozen more Democratic incumbents in various degrees of jeopardy. That’s right, four dozen.

If 1994 and 2006, the two most recent wave elections, are the barometers, a good number of these off-the-radar challenges will succeed. Remember Republican Sue Kelly? Few D.C. operatives knew the New York moderate even had a problem until election night. How about Democrat David Price? He lost in 1994 in a North Carolina district chock full of college professors and scientists. Or Virgil Goode in 2008, who still had hundreds of thousands of dollars in his campaign account when he got surprised by netroots fringer Tom Perriello. These 35 or 40 races that are getting scant attention from either party right now could yield handfuls of new Republican freshmen, if history is any guide. If Democrats don’t cut bait on their higher-profile but already beaten freshmen soon, they’ll never get the chance to mitigate these surprises — and minus-39 seats might start looking awfully attractive.

Read the rest of it here. I'm beginning to think my prediction of 56 seats is going to be low.