After a midterm election in which Dems already picked up 30 GOP-held House seats, are there really another 35 such seats in play going into the 2008 elections? Yes, according to a Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee memo written by DCCC chair Chris Van Hollen that was sent out today to "interested parties" (i.e., donors and the media).

"I am in the process of targeting open seats, districts where Republicans won by less than 5%, seats won by Kerry in the 2004 Presidential election and districts occupied by ethically challenged incumbents," Van Hollen writes. He adds that there are 20 GOP House seats where the GOPer won by than 5 percent of the vote.

Van Hollen also promises an aggressive effort to continue pummeling GOP incumbents on ethics questions. "The 2006 cycle proved that ethics matters to average voters," he writes. "While there were several Republicans defeated this past cycle as a direct result of their ethical lapses, a handful returned to Washington and should be considered among the most vulnerable. We will aggressively work in districts targeting ethically challenged incumbents like Tim Murphy (PA-18), Gary Miller (CA-42), Rick Renzi (AZ-01), John Doolittle (CA-04), Jerry Lewis (CA-41) and Vito Fossella (NY-13)."

Of course, this is hardly the whole story, since plenty of Dems also picked up seats by less than 5% of the vote, and resources will have to be invested in retaining those seats. A quick Election Central tally shows that nearly half the House seats picked up by Dems -- 13 -- were also won by less than 5% of the vote. So the memo tells only part of what's going on.

Still, our quick tally does show that there were significantly more seats held by the GOP within a 5% margin (20) than there were Dem pickups with that margin (13). So maybe Van Hollen is right when he writes that Dems are "aggressively on offense."