Welcome back to Beyond the Polls. This week, I'm joined by Indiana political guru Brian Howie to discuss

President Trump's challenges to seven sitting Republican state senators. Let's dive in.

Well, we're coming to an end of our primary drought. We haven't had a primary for the entire month, but starting in May, we're going to have a lot every single week. Next week, we have the Indiana and Ohio primaries, and then after that we have Nebraska and West Virginia, and then it starts to get really fun, particularly with the Saturday primary,

where Senator Bill Cassidy discovers whether or not he's going to make it to the runoff

or whether or not his senatorial career ends before we even get to the nominee.

But I don't want to talk about that other than to set the stage that we're about ready

to get into a lot of primaries,

and that means you're going to get a lot of guests on this program to talk about those

primaries. I'm going to try and have somebody or multiple people who are experts in all of

these different races be educating all of us on each of the next few programs.

Where I want to go this week is to talk about something that won't show up in the

primary statistics, but at least now, but will show up in your inbox if it hasn't already. And

that's Ron DeSantis' proposed redistricting in Florida. That the map, Susantis dropped on Monday, purports to be a 24-4-R map.

It's currently a 28 Republican advantage. It's already a gerrymandered map, but it's preparing to become

super gerrymandered. And on the face of it, this looks like a pretty solid bet that all of the seats that

he has added were won by President Trump by between nine and 18 points, three of them at

10 or above, one at 9.2%. And you'd think, well, you know, Trump, nine or above, that's probably going to be pickups.

There's not a single Democrat who holds a seat that Trump won by 9.2 points or above.

The part I'm kind of playing around there. Jared Golden of Maine holds one that Trump won by 9.1.

But truth is truth. 9.2 is different than 9.1.

And it's also notable that Jared Golden is retiring rather than face the voters again, and this is

one of the few seats that even in a bad environment, most observers are tipping to flip Republican

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