Hey, everybody. It's me, Sam Stein, managing editor at the board, joined by Tim Miller.

Look at him in what appears to be a hotel. Nice shirt. Getting ready to interview Kamala Harris. Yeah, this is how you get ready to interview Kamala. You know, you just get into your cozy t-shirt. You start to think about it. You start to think about everything, you know, everything that came before. you start to marinate how you didn't you didn't just fall out of a coconut tree you know you

just gonna say yeah are you not eating coconuts it that, you know, everything that came before, you start to marinate how you didn't, you didn't just fall out of a coconut tree.

I was going to say it.

Yeah, are you not eating coconuts to like prep for this? I am. So I'm thinking about all that. I'm just going to get in the right headspace. I'm also thinking about redistricting. Yes. Oh, wow. What a segue. What amazing turn. Yeah, we're going to talk about redistricting here.

Two big stories that just popped today.

It's like midday, November, Tuesday, the 18th. The first I want to talk about is Texas, because Texas was like the big get for Republicans. They made a big show. It started this whole process. They're going to redistrict. They're going to get five seats for Republicans. And with today, a federal court in Texas blocked the state from using the redrawn

maps. They did so because they said it was done at sort of on a racial biased level or

try to racial gerryman in the state. And so by two to one ruling with one of the judges being a

Trump appointee, it basically said you're going to have to use the old maps for the midterms.

Now, before we get into it, it can be appealed. It will be appealed. It can be stayed. It likely

will be state, although who knows. But if it does hold, this would be an incredible

embarrassment for Trump could end up meaning that the Democrats leave this entire process

with an actual gain of a seat or two. So I don't know what your thoughts are on here, Tim.

I potentially even more. So I didn't interview Dave Wasserman, who is his ex-handle, his Twitter handle, is at Redistrict. So, you know, he knows a little bit about this.

He's the authority here. So people can go watch that if they want to get really nerdy. But like just the broadest contours that I'll get to Texas about, you know, kind of just how much this has changed in the last month because it's truly a remarkable turn of events.

Like the, the Republicans were in a position, even with California, to kind of set this up to gerrymander themselves about like a 12 seat gain in the whole country, which would have been pretty significant.

And then on top of that, this voting rights Rights Act, which is the other kind of legal

things happening in addition to Texas, you know, had that been, had that, if that was overturned,

you know, soon during a winter emergency session by SCOTUS, then maybe additional state,

you know, you could have been in a situation where I was literally getting messages from people

who know this stuff, who are nerds, who know I'm a nerd, who are like, if everything goes right for the Republicans, then they might, they might win. They might successfully gerrymandered the country to such a degree. Yeah, that the Democrats couldn't do it even in a wave. Like, that was the worst case scenario. Now, that was going to be, you know, all of the Republican states going exactly as they want. It was going to be the VRA, right? So it was a worst case scenario. But just like, that was literally on the, literally on the table, like three weeks ago. And now, like, we've had these series of actions, including Virginia, where the Democrats got aggressive and are going on offense. Maybe they will go in some

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