A few predictions
The beauty of making predictions is no one really remembers them. After all, who remembers that I picked Mitt Romney to win with about 290 electoral votes. Or picked Texas to play Cincinnati in the World Series?
Nevertheless, let's have a little fun and look ahead to 2014:
Aaron Rodgers and Green Bay will shock the NFL world by winning their way to the Super Bowl.
Manning (Denver) will beat Rodgers in the Super Bowl and then retire from the NFL to run for governor of Tennessee, Indiana or Colorado. What else is there for him to do in the NFL anyway?
On Rangers' opening day, Shin-Soo Choo will live up to his .389 lifetime on-base percentage and walk to lead off the game. Prince Fielder will follow with a 2-run homer and everybody will say: Hamilton who?
The GOP will likely win Senate seats in Arkansas, West Virginia, Alaska, Montana, and South Dakota. The majority, or 51st vote, will come by winning Louisiana or North Carolina. Winning that many seats is always easier said than done because you have to have a lot of good candidates.
The GOP will keep the House with small gains. Gerrymandering works.
However, my House and Senate predictions could be totally different if there is a wave anti-ObamaCare electorate, as Chris Cilliza warns Democrats:
"First, a midterm election is in large part about turning out your base - and no issue revs up the Republican base like health care. Eighty-eight percent of Republicans disapprove of how President Obama has handled the implementation of the Affordable Care Act, with 77 percent (!) "strongly" disapproving, in a December Washington Post-ABC News poll.
Second, the fact that Obama's statement that "if you like your insurance, you can keep it" wound up not being true is a Republican admaker's dream.
Ending Spending, a conservative outside group, has put out ads attacking Sen. Jeanne Shaheen (D-N.H.) over her support for the health-care law, using Obama's words against her.
"If you like your senator, you can keep her," the narrator intones. "If not, you know what to do." Ouch.
There will be thousands more ads just like that one before the election cycle is over."
My guess is that the intensity in 2014 with be on the anti-ObamaCare side. It will translate into huge turnouts, or the kind of numbers that can change midterm into wave elections.
If there is a wave then the GOP will pick up the Senate and continue building up numbers in state legilslatures.
P. S. You can hear CANTO TALK here & follow me on Twitter @ scantojr.