At the end of 2013, I didn't publish anywhere a list of predictions for this year, so I don't really have a scorecard I can use to gauge my success or failure as a prognosticator and pundit.

Honestly, I vowed to myself that I would give up that game after I sat on Mike Gousha's TV show one Sunday morning in 2010 and confidently predicted that Scott Walker's inevitable association with Sarah Palin would lead to his defeat. Back then, the nation still had a clear memory of her political … what's the opposite of acumen? Ineptitude? … and I was sure the good people of Wisconsin would see the same in Walker and, as they did McCain-Palin, turn him away.

There's video of that somewhere. I don't know where. I have never wanted to see it again.

What I'm saying is there's no way to check what I got right and wrong for 2014. But I can talk about what surprised me this year and what did not.

I was not surprised, for example, that Walker won reelection this year. I mean, if people were willing to elect him in 2010 and 2012, what was going to stop them in the midst of a Republican wave election? The margin was larger than I expected, but I actually went to bed at like 7 p.m. on election night because I knew what was coming and I just didn't feel like dealing.

I was also not surprised that Democrats gave up control of the U.S. Senate. I was surprised, though, at how completely they rolled over. I know I wrote about this last month, but Democrats took a look at President Obama's approval rating and ran for the hills. The popularity of Obama's policies – among real people, that is, not among the talk-show hosts and Washington DC elite – should have been a sign that yes, Virginia, there is a way to win as a Democrat.

By which I mean, I was surprised by Minnesota. I have said this before, and I will likely say it several times next year, too, but Minnesota is the basically the Bizzaro Wisconsin. In every way that Wisconsin under Scott Walker has veered right, Minnesota has veered left. Walker cut taxes on the wealthy while Minnesota's Mark Dayton raised them; Walker attacked unions while Dayton embraced them; and so on down the line.

I did not expect, in this super-Republican wave year, that the Minnesota liberal experiment would be allowed to continue unabated. But Dayton was re-elected, as was every state-wide Democratic (technically, Democrat-Farm-Labor) candidate on the ballot including Senator Al Franken, who embraced Obama in a way that losing Democratic incumbents refused to. Five of Minnesota's eight House seats are Democratic.

Though the DFL lost one house of the Minnesota legislature to the GOP, that state still stands in contrast to Wisconsin and the nation, which fully succumbed to the wave. I can only hope Dayton stays his course – it's working better that Walker's course, that's for sure – and continues to prove to the nation that liberal economic policies work.

Speaking of: I was actually surprised to see Kansas Gov. Sam Brownback reelected, even though it was obviously going to be a wave year. He is a Republican dream, and has been well reported, implemented a hyper-conservative economic agenda in his state that four years on seems to have failed miserably.

Even more so than in Wisconsin, the GOP in Kansas fully indulged its id, cutting taxes, slashing budgets, and waiting on a Laffer-curve miracle that has not yet arrived. Lagging its neighboring states, which while Republican-led did not double down on conservative policies, and running big deficits, Kansas seemed ready to send Brownback packing, and I am amazed to find him still in place steering the state hard right into its skid.

I was surprised – but happy! seriously! – that the Wisconsin legislature couldn't get its act together to pass a "school accountability" bill. I don't have room here to get into what was wrong with the proposed bill, but I found it remarkable that Republicans couldn't shoehorn something through despite their ownership of the legislature. The reality-based Republican caucus is now almost completely gone, though, so who knows what 2015 will bring.

I was not surprised Bob Donovan announced he's running for mayor of Milwaukee. Nor am I surprised that he's grabbed a hold of the Milwaukee streetcar with both hands as perhaps his most important campaign issue to date. Donovan has never been one for subtlety, and the streetcar proposal is exactly one of those things that people who don't go in for subtlety can yell about. That's because getting it, the way it is funded and why it's a smart idea for a city that often trails its national peers in cool things like jobs and investment, takes some patience and some nuance.

It's much easier for loudmouths like Donovan to yell about it than to explain why he wants to give $50 million to some other city to do their own streetcar or why not building a streetcar line will create some magic pot of new money to spend on things people think they can have instead. With falling gas prices – another thing that honestly surprises me! – finding support for public transit projects like the streetcar is hard enough.

That is not an exhaustive list, by any stretch, but I've run out of space for the week. But what about you? Hit the "Talkback" feature below or leave a Facebook comment to add your own list of things that did or did not surprise you in 2014. I would love to hear your thoughts!