The Senate races for 2016, in a practical nutshell

[Statistikhengst]

This guy at electoralvote.com does such an outstanding job of collecting Senate polling data and putting it into an interactive map, I see no reason to re-invent the wheel:

2016 Senate Races

At the current time, 34 seats are up for grabs. I say "at the current time" because of course, anything could happen: a Senator in a state that is not slated for a class 3 election, as it is technically called, could step-down, be incapacitated, or, and let's hope not in any way, die. For instance, in 2014, we had TWO Senatorials in Oklahoma and also in South Carolina. So, it's always possible that that number could rise from 34 to 35, even 36, but it will not go under 34.

The Republicans are defending 24 seats, the Democrats are defending 10 seats.

Here's what the votemaster from the website says about the interactive map:

This simple fact gives the Democrats more targets and some of the targets are Republicans in blue states, such as Sen. Pat Toomey (R-PA), Sen. Mark Kirk (R-IL), and Sen. Ron Johnson (R-WI).

The map above shows only the 10 Democratic and 24 Republican seats up in 2016. In the legend to the right of the map, "Strongly Dem" includes the states where the Democrat won by > 10% in 2010 as well as the 36 Democrats not up in 2016. Similarly, "Strongly GOP" includes the states the Republicans won by > 10% in 2010 as well as the 30 Republicans not up in 2016.

To capture the Senate, the Democrats need to win a net of five Republican seats or four seats and the vice presidency.

The Democratic-held seats are listed first below, in alphabetical order by state, with the Republican ones following.

Click on a picture for the candidate's home page.
Click on a name for the candidate's entry in the Wikipedia.
Click on a party (D) or (R) for the state party.

So, regardless of your party or ideological standing, this is an excellent website to use to get the information pretty darned fast.

Also, this WIKI can be a very useful reference tool. I am impressed with how people keep it filled with actual, factual, useful data.

Hope those links help.