Hi, this is Josh Marshall, and this is the Josh Marshall podcast.

Today we are seven days out from the midterm, 2018 midterm elections.

Things are moving very quickly.

There's obviously a huge amount at stake.

We are going to look a little bit

at the sort of the big national stuff,

but we have a very interesting guest today his name is

Daniel Squadron he's a former New York state legislator who has an who is the

executive director of an organization that focuses on state legislative races.

And I think a lot of us know that state legislative races are these sort of unsexy political contests that nonetheless have a huge amount of impact

not only on the federal government, but just on people's lives. So you know why did

your state not have Medicaid expansion? Well because Republicans run the state

legislator. Why is there lead in your water and why is your state gerrymandered? So it's a 50-50 state, but you know, 10 out of the 11 representatives come from districts that are gerrymandered for Republicans.

Think you know on and on and on these things are very are really critical and there has been a public conversation among Democrats that during

the Obama years Democrats lost over 900 legislative seats across the country.

Now I think Obama has, my personal sense, has sort of unfairly been saddled with that, that it was, you know, kind of he

wasn't paying attention or something like that. It goes it goes much deeper than

that. But a lot of Democrats have understood that this is a big deal and this kind of ground level

organizing is is really critical.

But even, you know, I do this, I do this for a living and you know, I probably couldn't name a dozen state legislators around the country.

That's like pitiful.

Except for the ones that I have seen in the headlines getting indicted.

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