Hello and welcome to another episode of Goodskews. I'm Matt Hilderith and I'm here with Joe Sudbey.

We're going to be talking all about the good news in state and local elections. There's a lot that's happening, Joe, in a lot of places in the country.

You have a show on Sirius XM, State of the States, talking a lot about state and local elections.

Can you give folks just a little bit of context on your show and who you are before we jump into the specifics on the good news.

Sure. Well, first, thanks for having me, Matt. So I host a show, as you said, on the

Sirius XM Progress Channel called State of the States. I started my career when I came to D.C.

working for an organization then called Handgun Control, and I worked on

state legislation. It's always been something I focused on what was happening outside of D.C.,

which is odd being in D.C. and focusing on what's outside of D.C. because so much happens.

And I always said, Republican Jews state legislatures for three things. They use them as

incubators for their kind of batch of crazy ideas. They use them as pipelines for their version of

talent. And they use them as ways to figure out how to prevent people from participating in the

electoral process through gerrymandering,

through voter suppression laws, and increasingly through trying to restrict ballot measures.

But I always felt that on the progressive side, there wasn't that level of commitment to the state

legislatures. And after the 2010 elections, which were horrific at the congressional level, it was even worse at the state legislatures. And after the 2010 elections, which were horrific at the congressional

level, it was even worse at the state level. So we've been digging out a lot since then.

So I started the show in 2017 on Sirius XM Progress. We used to do it just during election cycle.

But the past few years, we've been going year-round because so much

is happening at the state in state legislatures. And also, there are special elections and elections

all the time, too. So I try to highlight them and keep as much attention on that as I can.

And that's a really good point, because when most people think about the Democratic Party,

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