Tons of news from all around the country as we head into the home stretch: the final debate in the Ohio Senate race took place last night, as did a spar between Bachmann and Wetterling in hotly contested MN-6. In Illinois, more bad news for Rod Blagojevich yesterday as one of his big campaign donors pled guilty to taking kickbacks while sitting on two state boards. There's much, much more, all available on the RCP Politics & Elections page.

We've also launched a new page showing the current state of play in the battle for the House of Representatives. You can still access these seats ranked by order of competitiveness here.

Still on the sujbect of the House, here's a good piece of analysis on Illinois 6 and Illinois 8 from Eric Krol of the Daily Herald:

Roskam and Duckworth don't agree on much, but both campaigns do agree the race is about tied. They're left fighting for the 10 percent to 15 percent of undecided voters, and to ensure their base supporters turn out as strongly as possible.

The advantage on the undecideds would seem to break Duckworth's way -- if you've lived in the 6th District under retiring Rep. Henry Hyde and aren't the proverbial rock-ribbed Republican, odds are fairly decent you're fed up with either the war, the congressional page scandal or the economy's jobless recovery.

But the advantage on the base turnout would seem to break Roskam's way -- he's been a state lawmaker in the district and has a large corps of committed supporters.

He's also got what's left of the once-vaunted DuPage County GOP, assuming its chairman, Kirk Dillard, has forgiven Roskam for costing him the state Senate GOP leader position four years ago. It's worth noting that in the March primary, an unopposed Roskam collected about 50,800 votes -- 18,000 more than the three Democrats mustered collectively. The Duckworth camp doesn't concede the ground troops point, however, claiming the scores of college-age volunteers coming in to help give them a closer-to-even playing field.

If Roskam never pictured himself in a dogfight with a Democrat, McSweeney certainly didn't count on being down to Democratic U.S. Rep. Melissa Bean by double-digits in most polls.

Just two years ago, the 8th Congressional District voted 56 percent for President Bush. McSweeney viewed Bean's upset as more of a referendum on longtime incumbent Phil Crane than any sign of a true Democratic tide. [snip]

McSweeney's hope is to spend his own money on enough negative ads to bring Bean's numbers down and to count on the lower turnout a non-presidential year brings. Bean hasn't hit 50 percent yet, and there's a third-party, anti-war candidate, Bill Scheurer, who might pull votes from her.

Ultimately, what must be the most puzzling to the Republicans is that they cut a deal with the Democrats to draw up the state's congressional map to keep a 10-9 balance of seats. It's starting to look like they didn't draw those lines finely enough to preserve that advantage.

Get the lastest polls, news, and analysis on these races here (IL-6 | IL8).