Insider D.C. paper The Hill has a story on the competing Democratic and Republican game plans in the battle for control of the U.S. senate this season.

Washington State figures less prominently than our local egos may have imagined.

Eight states are emerging as the battlegrounds that will decide the margin of Senate control, according to interviews with Republican and Democratic strategists.

They are Colorado, Illinois, Kentucky, Missouri, Nevada, Pennsylvania, West Virginia and Wisconsin.

The GOP committee has pledged $2 million in coordinated spending to Republican candidate Carly Fiorina in California and reserved $3 million in television airtime in Washington for the month of October.

But a Republican political strategist with Senate ties is skeptical of knocking off Sens. Barbara Boxer (D-Calif.) or Patty Murray (D-Wash.) or winning Connecticut, given the dominance Democrats have shown in those states in recent years.

Of course, what's missing from The Hill's equation are the independent expenditure TV buys (paid for by undisclosed donors), which have so far favored spending on Dino Rossi.

Sen. Patty Murray has already been hit with four IEs so far, including one by Karl Rove's group American Crossroads—which has booked $1.4 million worth of ads for October.

There's also one by the American Action Network. Who? Who knows?

And also one by a group called, ironically, Truth in Politics. The head of TIP is James Bopp, the legal counsel for the anti-gay rights group, Protect Marriage Washington, which ran the R-71 campaign.

And finally,  a fourth one by the National Tax Payers Union.

Rossi has been hit with one by a Democratic group called Commonsense 10 that's been up for about a week now.