Democrats seem to be almost ready to unveil their messaging for the 2018 election cycle. Ever since the disastrous 2016 election, they've been regrouping and trying to figure out a way forward. They did not launch a formal examination of what went wrong last year (unlike Republicans in 2013, there has been no "post-mortem" or "autopsy" document from the Democrats), instead they have focused on tightening up their message to move forward next year. The Washington Post just ran a preview of the Democratic strategizing, and reports that Democrats will be rolling out the whole thing next Monday.

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Sometimes, even when reading professional journalism, you have to connect the dots on your own. This week both the president and the vice-president interacted with NASA, and the results were... well... kind of spacey.

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So the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee is running a few new campaign slogans up the old flagpole, but so far it doesn't seem like many people are saluting them. It's the D.C.C.C.'s job to get more Democrats elected to the House of Representatives, and part of that job is to help out Democratic candidates with messaging they can use in their campaigns. But what they came up with is pretty insipid -- and I'm even bending over backwards to be polite, at that.

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Up until now, congressional Democrats have been smart to merely stand on the sidelines and watch Republicans flail on their "repeal and replace Obamacare" efforts. This follows the sound political theory of: "When your opponent is digging his own grave, don't interrupt him." But at some point in the near future, Democrats are going to have to offer up their own better ideas for what to do next on healthcare. There are already many pushing for single-payer or (as Bernie Sanders likes to call it) "Medicare for all." This, however, is quite likely a bridge too far -- even within the Democratic Party. Instead of such a radical change, Democrats would do much better to rally around a more transitional idea that was jettisoned during the drafting of the Obamacare law: the public option.

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The next few days are going to be pretty frantic in the Senate. The Congressional Budget Office just released its scoring of the Republican "repeal and replace" healthcare bill, and the numbers are almost as dismal as the House version's. But will it matter? At this point, it's impossible to really predict, as the entire political world waits to see what senators like Susan Collins and Lisa Murkowski have to say about it.

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Every so often, we have a certain reaction to a bit of political news. We then fully expect at least a few other political commentators to have the same reaction, only to be surprised when it seems that nobody else read things the way we did. This is precisely where we find ourselves over President Donald Trump's recent tweets, where he supposedly put the issue to rest of whether secret audio recordings were ever made in his White House. Everybody seems to be buying his spin, and nobody questioned the obvious loophole he left himself. Because if you read what he wrote and take it at face value (not reading more into it than he actually says), Trump still has not answered the question of whether such tapes exist or not. Not even close.

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In the aftermath of this week's special House election in Georgia, the question has arisen whether Nancy Pelosi should continue to hold the House Minority Leader position, heading into the 2018 midterm elections. It's a valid question, since Republican Karen Handel seemed almost to be running against Pelosi herself, if you saw any of her campaign ads or literature. Her entire strategy seemed to be to link neophyte politician Jon Ossoff with Pelosi -- and not in a good way. It's impossible to tell how much this contributed to Ossoff's loss, but if the answer to that question turns out to be "four percent of the vote or more," then demonizing Pelosi would have been the difference between his winning and losing. So is it time for Nancy to go?

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After tomorrow night's special House election results in the sixth congressional district in Georgia ("GA-6") are known, there will be a bumper crop of political commentary attempting to explain "what it all means going forward." No matter what the outcome, dire consequences will be predicted for one side of the aisle or the other. Sweeping conclusions will be drawn and confident predictions made by pundits far and wide. In the end the GA-6 election may deserve all of this attention, but then again there's an equal chance that it may not. But deserved or not, there will be real political consequences in the medium-term, as one party or the other may radically shift its campaign strategy for the 2018 midterms based on tomorrow night's results. So it will wind up being a consequential election, even if all of the fulminating about "what it all means" turns out to be incorrect.

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Today is the second of four special elections for the House of Representatives caused by Donald Trump naming House members to administration positions. The first was in Kansas, where the Democrat lost (but by a much closer margin than anyone expected). We've been through the first round of voting in another of these special elections, down in Georgia. More on that in a moment. The final race is in South Carolina, and is considered the longest longshot of the bunch for Democrats to pick up (all four of these were Republican-held seats). Today, Montanans go to the polls to elect their one at-large House member.

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The new Congressional Budget Office numbers are in for the House healthcare bill, and they're almost as breathtakingly bad as the first version's score. Instead of 24 million Americans losing health insurance in the next ten years, now "only" 23 million will lose health insurance. The number of people who will lose health insurance next year alone stayed the same, at 14 million. Medicaid funding will be cut by $834 billion, instead of $880 billion. This would save a paltry $12 billion a year, instead of the $15 billion a year the original bill would have saved. That's a lot of pain for not very much money saved. Which Democrats are going to be pointing out soon, in midterm ads.

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