Hey, quick favor. We need your input. For a few weeks, this August, we are going to be giving

ourselves our usual late summer break, and as usual, we'll be running some favorites from the

archives. But this year, we are asking for your help in deciding what to run. In our newsletter,

we're going to be doing a series of votes on what episode we should feature each day.

So it's up to you to chime in,

and that will help us decide. All you have to do is subscribe to the This Day newsletter at

thisdaypod.com. We'll be sending on our first poll soon, so jump on it.

Hey there, welcome to This Day, a history show from Radiotopia.

My name is Jodi Avergan.

And today, an episode that will hopefully provide some context for one of the biggest stories taking place right now.

We usually do these context episodes on Sundays, but this story was really playing out over the weekend,

so I wanted to wait until today, Monday, to bring it to you. As you may know, at this moment,

there is a contingent of Democratic legislators from Texas who have fled the state and are camped out in Illinois.

They are doing this because Republicans in Texas are proposing a drastic redistricting of that state,

which would greatly benefit Republicans,

not just in Texas, but add up to five seats for Republicans in Congress.

The proposal is happening between redistricting cycles and Republicans, from Donald Trump

down to legislators in Texas, are basically admitting that this is a ploy to get more congressional seats in next

year's midterms. They're really not hiding the game here. Redistricting and gerrymandering have

always struck me as at odds with the basic idea that a democracy should represent all people

equally. This is taking things to a whole new level, and it fits right in line with the more

aggressive anti-democratic approach to elections on the part of MAGA Republicans we've seen over the last

...