The great political surprise of 2018 will be the size of the Republican victory. 
 
 After members of the elite media have spent two years savaging President Trump, lying about Republican legislation, and reassuring themselves that Republican defeat was inevitable, the size of the GOP victory in 2018 will be an enormous shock. 
 
 Two very interesting columns (one by Barry Casselman and one by Scott Adams) illustrate how the media is deceiving itself. 
 
 Casselman contends that the Democratic victory in Alabama may have blocked a year-long embarrassment and actually strengthened Republican prospects in the Senate. He asserts there may be a new political wave coming, but no one knows whether it will be a red or blue wave. 
 
 As I listened to the end of the year "analysts," I was struck by how little they know, how little they have questioned their own mistakes, and how mutually reinforcing their false information has been. 
 
 Adams, the author of Dilbert, has a list of 20 political opinions and predictions made about President Trump and his Administration, which were just plain wrong. He suggests if you were wrong about 15 or more of these assertions, you might quit talking about politics while Trump is in the White House. By Adams’s standard, most elite "analysts" would have to be quiet, because they have been so consistently wrong about Trump. 
 
 As I listened to the end of the year "analysts," I was struck by how little they know, how little they have questioned their own mistakes, and how mutually reinforcing their false information has been. 
 
 These are not analysts. These are liberal propagandists. Much of what they assert is just plain wrong. Fake news is, sadly, an accurate term. And the topic about which they have been the most fake is the GOP’s Tax Cuts and Jobs Act. 
 
 First, the media lied about the tax bill in an effort to convince most Americans their taxes would go up. 
 
 Then, the media took surveys of people who opposed the GOP bill based on the false information supplied by the media. 
 
 Then, the media talked again and again about how unpopular the Republican plan was and how it was going to weaken Republican candidates in 2018. 
 
 Then, the bill passed, and unsurprisingly, it turned out to be dramatically better for Americans than the elite media had described. 
 
 In fact, the tax cuts will be the 2018 proving ground of media liberal bias and dishonesty. 
 
 CBS News just provided a vivid example of the false impressions created by the liberal news media’s lies. They interviewed three families about how they expected the GOP tax bill to affect them. Then they had a CPA tell them, on camera, what they would actually be paying in taxes next year. 
 
 Of course, after months of convincing most Americans their taxes would go up, the three families either expected to be paying more in taxes or to not save any money. And you can tell by watching the segment that the liberal hosts expected the same. 
 
 Of course, it turned out that all three families would pay less under the GOP tax cuts than under current law. 
 
 A North Carolina single mother with an income slightly under $40,000 who didn’t think she would be affected will keep about $1,300 more per year under the GOP bill. 
 
 Two college teachers in Rhode Island with a joint income of over $150,000 a year thought they would pay more taxes, but they will actually pay about $650 less under the GOP tax cut. 
 
 The biggest surprise in the CBS report was the impact the tax cuts would have on a California couple with three children, a small business, and earning an income of approximately $300,000. The family believed that because California is a high-tax state, that capping state and local tax deductions would really hurt them. Instead, the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act will save them nearly $13,000 in taxes. 
 
 The look on the three families faces as they learned how much they would be saving was remarkable to behold. 
 
 The CBS analyst concluded "every one of the families will have more money in their pocket next year." 
 
 As my colleague Joe Desantis wrote me: "This segment drove me crazy. As if CBS was incapable of doing math before the tax cuts passed." 
 
 The gap between the news media falsehoods and the dramatically better reality of the GOP tax cuts will have three huge effects on the 2018 campaign: 
 
 1. The American people will be positively surprised and pleased by the degree to which Republicans kept their word and actually put more money in taxpayer pockets. After 10 months of frustration from trying to repeal Obamacare, Republicans have proven they can get big things done. 
 
 
 
 2. The news media’s dishonesty will be vivid at a personal level. People will be able to compare their personal experience with the news media's fake reporting and endless bias. As the truth sinks in, the ability of the liberal media to shape opinion will decline even further. 
 
 
 
 3. Democrats who voted against the bill will live to regret it as people look at their family budgets and realize Democrats in the House and Senate wanted Washington bureaucrats to have more money, rather than hard-working Americans. This will certainly be a losing proposition for the 10 Senate Democrats up for re-election in states President Trump won in 2016. 
 
 In fact, the stage is being set for a definitive election. 
 
 Do you want higher taxes, bigger bureaucracy, more power in Washington, and a smaller economy with lower take-home pay and fewer jobs? If yes, vote Democrat, because that is what they stand for and will continue to vote for next year. 
 
 If you want a bigger economy, more jobs, more take-home pay, less power with Washington bureaucrats, and lower taxes with more money in your pocket, then vote Republican. 
 
 If Republicans can learn to tell the truth better than the elite media and Democrats lie, the GOP will win an astonishing victory in 2018. ||||| It's not that there's no drama. It's that there's not much chance of big changes in national policy, no matter what happens. 
 
 Pundits know two things about next month’s midterm elections. First, Republicans will likely take the Senate. Two, the elections stink. In a recent column, David Brooks declared, “The 2014 campaign has been the most boring and uncreative campaign I can remember.” Washington Post blogger Chris Cillizza responded with a post titled, “David Brooks thinks 2014 is the ‘most boring’ campaign he can remember. It’s even worse than that.” 
 
 Brooks blames this dullness on the fact that Democrats and Republicans won’t change their minds. (“Polarization is deeply rooted in the economic conditions and personal values of the country.”) Cillizza blames it on the fact that both Democrats and Republicans can’t stand Washington. (“The American public are in a stage of disenchantment and anxiety that is historically unique.”) But the best answer I’ve seen comes from Ezra Klein, who argues that “elections are about stakes.” And the stakes in this one just don’t seem so high. 
 
 At a micro-level, after all, the 2014 elections have plenty of drama. In Kentucky, the Republican leader in the Senate has been fighting for his political life all year. In Kansas, an entrenched incumbent could lose to a little-known independent who won’t say which party he’ll caucus with. It’s even possible we won’t know who controls the Senate until December or January, when Louisiana and Georgia hold runoffs. 
 
 The dullness comes from this election’s lack of a compelling macro-theme. Yes, there are national refrains: Democrats in state after state call their Republican opponents heartless misogynists; Republicans call their Democratic opponents Obama clones. But there’s no big national issue on which voters feel that they can change the country’s course. It’s not that candidates today are more cynical or homogenized than in midterms past. It’s that the subjects they’re discussing cynically and homogenously don’t matter as much. 
 
 A look at the last four midterms makes the point. In November 1998, Bill Clinton’s impeachment hung in the balance. After proving initially wary of the issue, in the campaign’s final week the National Republican Congressional Committee launched an advertising campaign in 30 swing districts aimed at rallying the GOP base. One spot showed two mothers asking each other, “What did you tell your kids?” But the ads backfired. The people most energized by the specter of impeachment were Democrats, especially African Americans. (It was the 1998 impeachment struggle that launched Moveon.org—as in “move on to something more important than impeachment.”) 
 
 After expecting to win numerous House seats, the GOP ended up losing five. Speaker Newt Gingrich was forced to resign. Democratic Senator Robert Torricelli of New Jersey declared that as a result of the election, “Any serious effort to remove President Clinton from office is effectively over.” 
 
 In 2002, the stakes were just as high. Roughly a month before Election Day, the House and Senate had voted to authorize President George W. Bush to invade Iraq. But because Bush had agreed to a last-ditch United Nations inspection effort, and because he was still seeking UN approval for military action, many still believed an invasion could be averted. The midterms were thus cast as a referendum on war. 
 
 Like 2014, 2002 had plenty of micro-drama. After voting against the war, progressive hero Paul Wellstone died in a plane crash a week before Election Day. In Georgia, Republicans ran ads featuring Osama bin Laden and Saddam Hussein in an effort to depict Vietnam Veteran and triple amputee Max Cleland as soft on homeland security. But what made these local storylines nationally compelling was their connection to the still unresolved question of whether America would go to war. 
 
 By 2006, America was in the middle of another fierce debate about Iraq: Not whether to get in, but whether to get out. In a Washington Post poll two weeks before Election Day, a plurality of Americans called Iraq their top concern. And in exit polls, 55 percent of voters said they wanted some or all U.S. troops withdrawn. As in 2002, the dramatic local stories—Senator Joe Lieberman’s loss to an anti-war challenger in the Connecticut Democratic primary, ex-Marine Jim Webb’s defeat of potential presidential contender George Allen in Virginia—connected to this national debate in a way the key races this year do not. As it turned out, the victorious congressional Democrats did not force George W. Bush to rapidly withdraw U.S. troops from Iraq. But the prospect that they might gave the election its passion. 
 
 There's little reason a Republican Senate would substantially change American policy toward ISIS or Ebola. 
 
 Finally, the 2010 midterms occurred in the wake of the greatest economic collapse since the Great Depression and the largest expansion of the American welfare state since the Great Society. And back then, far more than today, both these subjects seemed up for grabs. Many Republicans believed that by winning Congress in 2010 and then the presidency in 2012, they could repeal, or at least cripple, Obamacare. With the deficit skyrocketing, the nascent Tea Party warned that only by radically changing course could America avoid becoming Greece. The size and scope of federal intervention in the economy seemed to hang in the balance in a way it had not since the 1930s. All the dramatic races that year—Sharron Angle’s effort to unseat Majority Leader Harry Reid in Nevada, Marco Rubio’s driving Charlie Crist out of the Republican Party in Florida, Rand Paul’s shocking victory in Kentucky—connected to that theme. I remember watching MSNBC on election night as liberal pundits speculated about whether the barbarians now at the gates would force a debt default that sent the global economy into meltdown. For conservatives, it was enthralling. For liberals, it was terrifying. It certainly wasn’t boring. 
 
 Today, these domestic-policy debates are more muted. Republicans still denounce Obamacare, but few still believe they can repeal it. Big partisan differences about the size of government remain, but with the deficit going down and Republicans no longer willing to go to the brink over the debt limit, the crisis atmosphere of 2010 has faded. Overseas, Americans worry about Ebola and ISIS, but those threats don’t divide them along partisan lines like Iraq. There’s little reason to believe that electing a Republican Senate would substantially change American policy toward either. 
 
 Don’t get me wrong. I’m not saying next month’s elections don’t matter. They do. As Annie Lowrey has predicted, a Republican Senate—if elected—will work mightily to prevent President Obama from using his executive authority to implement a broad range of government regulation. But these potential fights are mostly too narrow and too technical to grab public attention. Americans just don’t believe that as much hinges on their vote as did in 1998, 2002, 2006, or 2010. For many pundits, that makes this election boring. For many ordinary Americans, I suspect, it’s something of a relief.
– One common sentiment among political pundits is that Democrats are on track to deliver a political shellacking to Republicans in the 2018 elections. At Fox News, however, Newt Gingrich is predicting the "great political surprise" of the new year: Republicans will not only win, they'll win big. "After members of the elite media have spent two years savaging President Trump, lying about Republican legislation, and reassuring themselves that Republican defeat was inevitable, the size of the GOP victory in 2018 will be an enormous shock," writes the former House speaker. One key reason for his prediction is the newly passed Republican tax plan. Ordinary Americans have been told in the press over and over that the changes will hurt them and benefit the rich, he writes. But when people actually receive fatter paychecks next year, Gingrich argues, they'll see the truth. "In fact, the tax cuts will be the 2018 proving ground of media liberal bias and dishonesty," he writes. What's more, he predicts that Democrats who voted against the measure will pay the price in the midterms, particularly the 10 Senate Democrats up for re-election in states won by Trump. Click for the full column, in which Gingrich references another by Dilbert creator Scott Adams that offers up a list of 20 doomsday political predictions about Trump that Adams says failed to materialize.