I'm Lee Rowland. Welcome to At Liberty, the weekly podcast from the ACLU, where we talk about today's most pressing civil rights and civil liberties issues. On today's show, the midterms.

The 2018 midterm elections are less than a month away.

This fall's vote will determine the fate of governorships nationwide, which party controls the House and Senate, and the outcome of hugely consequential ballot questions in many states.

The stakes are predictably high, including for key civil rights and civil liberties.

Today, I'm talking with the ACLU's in-house political maven Fas Shakir to hear about what we're likely to see in next month's midterms.

Fazz is the national political director of the ACLU, and he's overseeing the organization's

political work as the ACLU enters the electoral fray like never before in its 99-year history.

Fas is a lifelong politicker. He's worked for both Democratic Party leaders Harry Reid

and Nancy Pelosi. He also worked for many years at the Center for American Progress,

including as co-founder and editor-in-chief of the political website, thinkprogress.org.

Fas, thanks so much for being with us today. It's an honor to be here. Thank you, Lee.

You're a lifelong politico.

When did you know that you had caught the politics bug?

I was in college, and I happened to get an internship in Washington, D.C.,

and I worked for former Senator Bob Graham of Florida, and I was involved in a variety of things that summer.

And up until that point, my parents, like many of my Pakistani friends' parents,

were trying to convince me to become a doctor.

And it was at that moment that I said, oh, doctor, no, that's terrible.

I just found something that really appeals to me in life, and I'm going to try to do this

for a while.

And so from college of my junior summer on all the way through, I had another internship

at the White House after that summer, I then got in a car and drove to Washington, D.C. after

...