Americans watching November's historic Senate elections will be flooded with figures during the coming months: Poll numbers. Fundraising reports. Party registration percentages. Past margins of victory. Odds from Las Vegas bookmakers. Does it really take an accounting degree to figure out which party has the advantage?

If you want to predict the outcome without the aid of a graphing calculator, remember just one number: 65. That's Highway 65, the north-south roadway that runs through Minnesota, Iowa, and Missouri, the major geographic focus for the GOP this year. Almost every place it touches has a hot Senate race. It may lack the glamor of Route 66, but this year, at least, Highway 65 is America's unofficial political barometer.

There will be other close races, of course. The Senate contests in New Hampshire, Tennessee, Georgia, and South Dakota are all looking like squeakers. But Republicans need to pick up just one Democratic seat to regain control of the Senate, and no other part of the country boasts a greater concentration of vulnerable Democrats than this northern part of the Highway 65 corridor. Both national parties are putting millions of dollars behind their candidates, and voters in all three states have already seen a flurry of expensive TV ads more than eight months before Election Day. In addition, President Bush and some of his top aides are making the region a kind of second home.

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