For the first time in an entire year, millions of Democrats woke up hopeful today. Rather than the continuing despair over the inescapable fact of "President Donald Trump," Democrats now have solid reason for political optimism. All of this cheerfulness stems from the election results of last night, where Democrats didn't just win and they didn't just win big, they absolutely swept the board. Which has many now predicting the swell of last night is the leading edge of a Democratic wave election, in next year's congressional midterms.

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Tomorrow is Election Day in certain parts of the country. As usual in odd-numbered years, the handful of major contests to be decided tomorrow night will be seen as a harbinger of what is to come in the 2018 midterm congressional elections. These off-off-year elections always seem to have an outsized effect on the narrative used by the political chattering class, as one party or another once again claims "the wind is at our backs" heading into the midterms. Sometimes these narratives prove to be correct, but other times they are later seen as nothing short of wishful thinking on a national scale. Figuring out the accuracy of the narratives which tomorrow's elections will breed won't be possible for another year, of course, but it won't stop the narratives from spreading in the meantime. Such narratives will certainly have an effect on the midterms, whether correct or not. So even if they prove to be false narratives in the end, they're worth paying attention to for the time being.

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To date, the two best hashtags we've seen to counter the just-released Republican tax plan are #BillionairesFirst and #NotOnePenny, so we decided to use them in our title. Because over the next few weeks, there will be a monstrous messaging battle between Republicans and Democrats over how their new tax cut plan should be framed. Democrats seem poised to win this battle, but then again there is no guarantee that's how it will play out. So today we thought we'd devote a large portion of the column to mustering up the arguments Democrats should immediately start making to any who will listen.

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With much fanfare, the Republican tax plan was unveiled today. This is an incredibly complex piece of legislation, so it's going to take more than one column to adequately examine what all their proposed changes will mean to American taxpayers. On many of these details, the GOP kept their cards pretty close to their vest until today, meaning this is the first chance everyone's got to figure out how each of these proposed changes will impact them personally. One idea which emerged a few days before the proposal was formally unveiled is to shrink Schedule A to "the size of a postcard." Schedule A is where taxpayers figure their itemized deductions, so it encompasses a lot of the other GOP proposals as well. But today, I'm going to focus on two in particular, because they provide some of the strongest arguments for Democrats and progressives to use in opposing this plan.

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Today we were all supposed to see the unveiling of the Republicans' tax plan, complete with facts and figures, drafted as a bill Congress could pass. This has not happened yet, because they can't agree among themselves over the details and are even now radically changing their own plan to assuage their own membership. We might see their tax plan tomorrow, but then again maybe we won't. There are many aspects of the GOP's tax plan that are broadly known so far, and others which are vague and ill-defined. The latter is what everyone's waiting to see, because drafting an actual bill means putting figures on paper rather than just creating political talking points -- which is so far all Republicans have done on many aspects of their plan. But they did put numbers to one radical change to the income tax law already, so their proposal to almost double the standard deduction while eliminating personal exemptions can already be subject to a deep and wonky dive into the numbers.

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As that learned philosopher Alice Cooper once said, welcome to my nightmare. Nightmares, actually, since (as usual) we have one terrifying tale of fright for the right, and one spine-tingling scare story for the left, just to be even-handed.

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There's an easy test to see whether Republicans in Congress care about financial deficits: Is there a Democrat in the White House? If so, then deficits are so important that the situation requires threats of government shutdowns and defaulting on the national debt to fight deficit spending. However, if there's a Republican in the White House, then (as Dick Cheney so eloquently put it) "deficits don't matter." This was on full hypocritical display once again this week, as congressional Republicans voted to blow a $1.5 trillion hole in the national debt, so that the wealthy and big corporations can enjoy massive tax cuts.

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While admittedly the Democrats have some fence-mending to do between the two wings of their party, at least their rhetoric doesn't lean quite so much towards military metaphors. But over on the Republican side of the aisle, both sides seem to be using the term "open warfare" to describe what is going on. Steve Bannon was the first to use the belligerent "warfare" terminology, but it now looks like allies of Mitch McConnell are just as committed to a battlefield fight over the course of the next year.

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I have to begin with an apology for that headline... but in the era of Donald Trump, it was impossible to resist. Senator Jeff Flake made the news today by announcing he will not be seeking re-election next year. He did so in a rather spectacular fashion, with a Senate floor speech that came close to denouncing Trump and all he stands for. As time goes by, more and more Republicans are taking the opportunity to do the same thing, but so far this hasn't much impact on the political world beyond the realm of rhetoric. So while I appreciate Flake's statement for the entertainment value alone, I also have serious doubts as to whether it means much in the grand scheme of things.

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Call this the week when White House Chief of Staff John Kelly lost all remaining shreds of credibility. Kelly, as we all know, was supposed to bring the adult supervision to the White House that would magically transform Donald Trump into a serious president. A retired Marine Corps general was going to whip the White House into shape, and clear sailing ahead would thus quickly ensue.

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