As a rule, I don't generally write touchy-feely columns where I talk about my own life or my personal feelings. This isn't that kind of blog, after all. I may give my personal impressions about politics in the midst of commenting on the issues of the day, but almost never spend a whole column navel-gazing. Today I'm departing from this general rule, and would like to offer up the following as a very personal Thanksgiving Day message to my readers. So if you're not into that sort of thing, I'd advise you to stop reading right now.

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There is one emerging scenario (which currently is in no way certain) where the Republican Party might just have to decide to swallow its outrage -- at least temporarily -- and welcome Senator Roy Moore into their ranks on Capitol Hill, no matter what he did with underage women in the past. Because if Moore wins his special election in Alabama while at the same time two Republican senators have publicly announced they'll be voting "no" on the GOP tax bill, then Moore's vote becomes the deciding one. If this comes to pass, the GOP will be faced with the hard choice of ignoring all their previous denunciations of Moore in order to pull off their first legislative win since Donald Trump took office. Call it a striking moral/political dilemma.

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The most popular game in Washington right now is trying to figure out where the Republicans are on their tax-cutting plan, and what they're about to do next. This game exists because nobody is really sure what's going to happen, leaving lots of room for rampant speculation. But the moves the Senate is apparently making right now (or, reportedly, at least seriously considering) either show that Republicans are pretty confident of their ability to get the legislation passed or that they're essentially creating excuses for why it isn't going to pass at all this year. Since these positions are so contradictory, it's worth examining the developing GOP politics over the tax bills.

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For a long time now, I've been calling on the Democratic Party to go through the same soul-searching exercise that Republicans did in 2013 after losing a presidential election. The GOP, back then, put out an "autopsy" or "post-mortem" document which examined why they lost and offered suggestions for improving the party's chances in the future. Democrats, I thought, would have been well-served by the same sort of self-examination after 2016, but it never actually appeared from the national party. Because it still hasn't appeared from the national party, a group of Democrats have been inspired to create such a document on their own. This new document can be viewed on the site democraticautopsy.org, and it is well worth a read by anyone who cares about the future of the Democratic Party.

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Democrats just had the first very good week they've had in an entire year. Tuesday night, they absolutely swept the board in the few elections that were held. Now, granted, this was an off-off-year election, so it's too soon to say whether this presages a Democratic wave (or even a Democratic tsunami) in next year's midterm elections, but that doesn't detract from the gains Democratic candidates made all over the map this week. Michael Murphy, a Republican political strategist, summed up the impact of Tuesday night thusly: "Donald Trump is an anchor for the GOP. We got that message in loud volume in Virginia. The canary in the coal mine didn't just pass out; its head exploded."

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Before Tuesday's election returns started coming in, I was cautious and wary of getting my expectations up too high. Yesterday, after the scope of the Democratic sweep had sunk in, I was in a much more optimistic mood. Today, with the Washington Post bombshell story on Roy Moore's disgraceful past, it seems like the time for some good old-fashioned wild-eyed speculation. Such has been the rollercoaster of the week for Democrats and progressives everywhere.

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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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If Democrats are ever going to have an even chance to control the House of Representatives for the next decade, they need to be fighting as hard as possible for control of more governors' offices. Normally these two things are not directly connected, but after the upcoming 2020 Census, they will be. Redistricting is, in most states, a political function of the state government, meaning control of the governor's office often means being able to gerrymander the lines to your party's advantage -- something Republicans proved very adept at doing after the 2010 Census. Democrats are at a decided disadvantage as things stand, so they need to score a number of victories in gubernatorial races in the next few years in order to level the House districting playing field.

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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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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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