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TRANSCRIPT

Jane Coaston: It’s Friday, August 22nd. I’m Jane Coaston, and this is What a Day, the show that is wishing Elon Musk the best after his very bad Wednesday. That’s the day he found out he has to pay $500 million to 6,000 workers he fired when he took over Twitter. It was also the day a judge said he must face a lawsuit filed by voters who say he defrauded them when he ran a one million dollar lottery during the end of the 2024 presidential campaign. I’d say I hope things get better for Elon, but I would be lying. [music break] On today’s show, President Donald Trump says thank you to law enforcement patrolling the crime-riddled streets of Washington, D.C. And Russia launches another aerial assault against Ukraine. But let’s start with the great redistricting race of 2025. 

[clip of Gavin Newsom] It’s all at stake. It’s happening in real time. People need to wake up, need to open their eyes. He’s rigging the ’26 election before one vote is even cast. 

Jane Coaston: That’s California Democratic Governor Gavin Newsom. After hours of debate Thursday, California lawmakers passed a redistricting plan aimed at winning Democrats up to five more US House seats in the 2026 elections. That’s just the latest step in the tit-for-tat gerrymandering battle playing out between red and blue states, started by none other than Trump loyalist Texas Republican Governor, Greg Abbott. The goal? Keep a comfy majority in Congress or claw your way to one by whatever means necessary. After Abbott and Newsom made moves to redistrict their states, New York and Indiana may be soon to follow. It looks like it’s time for Democrats to get off their high horse and then throw that high horse into a dumpster because sure, punching is wrong, but Republicans started it. 

[clip of Gavin Newsom] They fired the first shot, Texas. We wouldn’t be here had Texas not done what they just did. 

Jane Coaston: Here’s what Texas did. The state’s Republican-controlled House of Representatives passed a new congressional map Wednesday night that could give the GOP five more seats in Congress, which, understandably, made Texas House Democrats furious. Here’s Texas Democratic House Representative John Rosenthal at a press conference Wednesday evening. 

[clip of John Rosenthal] This process, y’all, was a total sham from the very beginning. And I don’t know if you saw some of the questions I asked on the House floor today. But if these folks can redraw the lines and change the districts in this state in the span of just a few weeks, they could do it in front of every election. 

Jane Coaston: Texas Democrats did their best. They literally fled their state for weeks, risking arrest and accruing hefty fines to stop the Texas House GOP from reaching Quorum and passing the Republican-favoring map. But Democrats couldn’t stay away forever, and the House-approved map will now head to the State Senate, where it’s likely to pass since the Texas Senate is also under GOP control. Meanwhile, the California map needs approval from voters in a special election scheduled for November. So, now what? I thought I’d ask former US representative and current Democratic candidate for US Senate Colin Allred. He stopped by the studio to break down what all this means for his home state and the 2026 midterms. Colin Allred, welcome to What a Day! 

Colin Allred: Yeah, thanks for having me. 

Jane Coaston: More than 50 Democratic reps fled the state to avoid votes on the new GOP maps, only to have the state close to getting those maps finalized anyway, likely this week. Do you think it was worth it? 

Colin Allred: It was. And, you know, I was a voting rights lawyer before I was ever in Congress after I played the NFL. And you know this is something I’ve been fighting against my whole career. But I think in many ways this was so blatant that folks understood this. Many times when I would work on voting rights over a decade ago, we’d almost have a hard time explaining to folks what gerrymandering was and what a voter ID would do in terms of discriminatory impact. This one was so blatant that people understood it, but it needed time for people to hear about it. And that’s what I think it gave was time. And then also for other states to organize and say, we’re gonna respond. 

Jane Coaston: For folks who only watch the headlines from outside of Texas, how many districts would be affected by these maps. 

Colin Allred: Yeah. 

Jane Coaston: And what would the before and after look like? 

Colin Allred: Yeah. So they are trying to, and they’re going to pass this map, and it’s gonna steal basically five Democratic districts. And these are majority minority districts. They’re messing with historic districts like in Houston, Barbara Jordan’s district that was created after the Voting Rights Act that communities fought for for decades to have a representative. You know, there’s somebody who represented my hometown and the area where I was born and raised in the Dallas area. I don’t know how you would even represent some of these districts that they’ve drawn. 

Jane Coaston: As you’ve mentioned, you were a three-term house rep from Texas’s 32nd district in the Dallas suburbs. How would the new maps change your old political stomping ground? 

Colin Allred: Well the district that I represented had already been gerrymandered in the turn of our decade here. So my first two terms was a gerrymander Republican seat that I’d flipped. My third term they put me packed me into a blue district that was a minority district. And that is now gone. That district is completely destroyed. And so they’ve taken us from having three Democratic seats in the Dallas-Fort Worth area when we probably should have five. But they’re going to take that down to two. And they’re doing that by just doing the most extreme packing and cracking, but also taking these districts and flinging them way out to parts of the state that have really nothing to do with Dallas or that have different interests. And that’s ultimately what I get frustrated with is that serving in Congress for me was personal because the hospital that I was born in was in my district. The high school that I went to was in district. I knew every cross street and I didn’t just run anywhere, I ran there because I knew that area. This just removes that public service element of it. 

Jane Coaston: You are running for a U.S. Senate seat from Texas. That race is statewide, so it’s not limited to a district. 

Colin Allred: Yeah. 

Jane Coaston: But I’m thinking about the spillover effects. 

Colin Allred: Yeah. 

Jane Coaston: Of these maps, though. How do you expect this fight over maps to affect races and seats that are not tied to just one district? 

Colin Allred: Yeah. I think there’s a couple of impacts that it could have. One is that sometimes a gerrymander can become a dummymander and you can make competitive races to where in a year that goes against you, that seat flips when you don’t think it would. That’s how, in many ways, I got into Congress. I ran in a gerrymandered seat for a 22-year incumbent Republican. It was drawn for him. It was supposed to be unwinnable for a Democrat. But it was changing and I thought that he got lazy and so we beat him in 2018 in the seat he thought he couldn’t be beaten in. So I think there’s a possibility that there’ll be more races and more competitive races. But I think the other thing is that, as I said, you know, they’ve kind of woken up something by being so blatant about this and about this power grab being so in your face that I think it’s kind of gotten people back up off their backsides a little bit. You know, it’s like when a bully pushes you too far, then you want to fight back. And I think particularly in the Black community, that’s what I’m saying, because much of this is targeted. What we’re seeing here is it’s just Black and Brown communities are going to have less representation. That’s fundamentally what’s going to happen here. 

Jane Coaston: I saw a tweet that you put out about all of this. You said, quote, “the GOP just shoved these racist nonsensical maps through. They’ve rigged the game, but they can’t silence Texans. We’ll take this fight to the ballot box and we’ll win.” The maps are literally meant to discourage Democrats from voting by diffusing their votes within new GOP majority districts. How are Democrats supposed to make this latest redistricting fight a winning issue? 

Colin Allred: Yeah. Well, number one, as I said, I think it’s woken people up. But the other thing I think is that when you draw these maps like this in a state where the numbers don’t add up, where you’re trying to get this many seats for Republicans, what it’s gonna end up doing is they’re gonna have some some more marginal districts, right? And they’re going to have some areas, what they’re really relying on is that we don’t come out to vote in some of those areas. And that we can try and fight back with, right, because there’s no way to reduce us from where we are. I think from 11 seats down, you know, taking five away to this point without putting a lot of Democrats into some of these Republican seats, right? And so I do think we have to fight there. But then I think the ultimate fight has to be to win races statewide to make sure that we in this midterm retake the House or take the Senate. And then the ultimate goal, I think, has to be to ban gerrymandering nationwide. And we can do that. We can require every state to have a nonpartisan redistricting commissions like y’all have in California and I worked on that when I was in Congress. We passed that out of the House. We just couldn’t get it to the Senate. I think we can do that. 

Jane Coaston: I mean, it’s interesting you bring up California, because right now, because of what’s been happening in Texas, you have Democratic Governor Gavin Newsom basically saying like, yeah, I know we’ve got this independent redistricting commission, but we see what’s happening in Texas where, you know, now California wants to change its maps to gain Democratic seats. You know, you were just talking about a gerrymandering ban. Before Trump basically asked Texas to revisit district lines to give him more votes–

Colin Allred: Yeah. 

Jane Coaston: Where did you stand on how redistricting should happen and did this episode change how you feel about it? 

Colin Allred: Yes, it doesn’t change how I feel about it. I’ve always, I hate gerrymandering. I hate it for a number of reasons. I hated it as a voting rights lawyer because what it does is it leads folks to think that, you know, why should I vote? The election’s already rigged. Whether you’re in a safe Democratic seat, safe Republican seat, and why should I even care, vote? I ran into it all time during my voting rights career. But as a member of Congress, I think it’s broken the house. Because it produces all these extremists who really only have to worry about getting elected by a small segment of their primary electorate. And so they get to Congress and they’re just wiling out. They don’t have any interest in governing. Why should they? That’s not what their incentive is gonna be for getting reelected, right? They’re not gonna run on the bills they’ve passed. They’re gonna run on all the rocks that they’ve thrown. When you reach a tipping point and you get too far of that, that’s when you get a Congress like we have now that’s completely broken. And so I always hated it. What I think now is that we have to fight fire with fire with the goal of being that we’re gonna ban this. I don’t think we can just say we’re just gonna continue to circle the drain and every state should do the most extreme gerrymander they can. That to me doesn’t make any sense. But we can say, we’re not gonna let you rig this election. We’re gonna respond to it. And then when we have the power, we’re going to ban this and we’re gonna require every state to have nonpartisan drawing of their districts. We can do that. 

Jane Coaston: So that actually goes to my last question for you, which is, I was talking about California Democrats, they’re talking about this issue in New York and Illinois’ governor has hinted he’d consider redistricting to give Democrats an edge there. What would you recommend to Democrats in power in blue states. 

Colin Allred: Yeah. 

Jane Coaston: On this issue? 

Colin Allred: I think that what we’re probably going to see is that this will not end in Texas and that this White House, we’ve already seen they’ve asked, I think, Indiana to consider. They’ll go to other southern states, everywhere where they know they have total control. And I think that this will continue up until the point where it’s too late, you know, running up into the, into primaries and things like that. And so I just think that this is, this is what I hate about what they’ve set off here, is that this is a race to the bottom. Right. But I think for any leader sitting there thinking we may have to respond, I think it has to have an end goal in mind. But the response is that this is short term. The response is, that we’re doing this so that the election can’t be rigged. But we’re also doing this also with the goal that we are going to make sure that given the power, we’ll end this practice. What we’re talking about though, it can’t just be that we doing this for politics. We’re doing because they’re trying to rig the elections because they want to rig the economy. They’re rigging the economy against working people and they passed this bill. They wanna avoid the consequences of it, right? And talk about that to normal folks, because if you grew up the way I did, being raised by a single mom, all these conversations about, you know, gerrymandering, we just probably wouldn’t have followed that. 

Jane Coaston: Right. 

Colin Allred: But you would follow that they gave a tax cut to the rich and they’re trying to kick you off your healthcare and raise your costs, right, and say, hey, listen, this is why they’re tryin’ to do that, and make sure that we connect this this political act that they’re doing to what they’re doing to real people. 

Jane Coaston: Colin Allred, thank you so much for joining me. 

Colin Allred: All right. Thank you. Appreciate it. 

Jane Coaston: That was my conversation with former U.S. Representative and current Democratic candidate for U. S. Senate, Colin Allred. We’ll get to more of the news in a moment, but if you like the show, make sure to subscribe, leave a five-star review on Apple podcasts, watch us on YouTube and share with your friends. More to come after some ads. [music break]

Jane Coaston: Here’s what else we’re following today. 

[sung] Headlines.

[clip of Vice President J.D. Vance] I’m here of course as a representative of the President of the United States that has done more for the prosperity of the American worker than a president, any president in a generation. So can we give it up for President Donald J. Trump because I know he’s watching. 

Jane Coaston: On Thursday, Vice President J.D. Vance praised Trump with a level of enthusiasm I assumed he was only capable of in the presence of a sectional. If you’re watching on YouTube, you can see just how excited he was. Vance spoke at a refrigeration plant in Fayette County, Georgia. He was joined by a group of the plant’s employees who stood under a large sign reading jobs, jobs, jobs. During his remarks, Vance talked up Trump’s big, beautiful law and dissed Georgia Democratic Senator John Ossoff will be up for re-election in a year. 

[clip of Vice President J.D. Vance] And the simple answer is because John Ossoff, whatever he pretends to be in his television commercials, he doesn’t give a damn about the third district and he doesn’ t give a damn about the people of Georgia, but we do and we’re going to fight for you every single day. 

Jane Coaston: Sure. Vance touched on a wide range of topics during his appearance, making sure to play all the MAGA hits. I’m talking immigrants stealing your jobs, the threat of the mentally ill, quote, “festering in our streets,” and why it’s somehow racist to reduce police presence in public. The vice president also focused closely on public safety in Washington, D.C. and Atlanta. 

[clip of Vice President J.D. Vance] And I don’t care what your political party is, but if you’re a family and you want to take your kid to a nice meal in downtown Atlanta, it’s about a 40 minute drive, take your kid to a nice meal in downtown Atlanta, you ought to be able to without being harassed by a criminal. We’ve got to take America’s streets back for the American people and that’s what the President of the United States is doing every single day. 

Jane Coaston: Anyway, he claimed armed robberies were down by over 50% in Washington D.C. in the last 10 days, ever since Trump mobilized the National Guard without citing any sources. Russia launched a missile attack on Western Ukraine overnight, officials said Thursday, striking targets including an American-owned electronics plant. It comes after President Trump tried to play middleman, holding separate talks about peace with Russian President Vladimir Putin last week and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky on Monday. But this latest attack injects further uncertainty into Trump’s efforts to end the years-long war. Russia’s defense ministry said the strikes targeted, quote, “enterprises of the Ukrainian military industrial complex.” Sure. But on Twitter, Zelensky wrote, quote, “the Russians practically burned down an American company producing electronics, home appliances, nothing military.” He added this. [Zelensky speaking in Ukrainian Russian] Zelensky is saying there, quote, “we believe this was a deliberate strike specifically on American owned property here in Ukraine on American investments.” A possible meeting between Zelensky and Putin is still up in the air. Russia’s foreign minister said Thursday, Putin is ready to meet with Zelensky to discuss peace terms, but only after key issues have been worked out by senior officials, which could take a very long time. I would assume relentlessly bombing another country might make the negotiating process more difficult. The Department of Justice subpoenaed the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia for information on gender-affirming care it’s given to minors. That’s according to reporting by the Washington Post. The subpoena, which was sent in June and made public on Monday, requested private information about those patients. For example, their social security numbers, home addresses, and dates of birth. Beyond that, the subpoena also requests, quote, “every writing or record of whatever type related to treatment of young transgender patients, including emails, Zoom recordings, encrypted text messages, and voicemails.” Last month, Attorney General Pam Bondi announced that the DOJ had subpoenaed more than 20 doctors and clinics that treat young transgender patients. Since then, more than a dozen U.S. Hospitals have downsized or ended their gender transition programs for patients under 19. One doctor told The Washington Post, quote, “Frankly, I’m looking over my shoulder driving home.” 

[clip of President Donald Trump] You guys are doing a fantastic job and gals doing an amazing job and we appreciate it. The numbers are down like we wouldn’t believe, but we believe it. Where do I stand here? 

Jane Coaston: Trump took a stroll around the neighborhood, and by that I mean, he appears to have been driven to a police precinct and thanked law enforcement for patrolling Washington D.C. Thursday evening. Of course, there was someone else who deserved congratulations. 

[clip of President Donald Trump] I’ve never received so many phone calls thanking me for what we’ve done in Washington, D.C. From people that haven’t gone to a restaurant in literally in four years. 

Jane Coaston: Yes, he is absolutely receiving calls thanking him from people who are definitely real, definitely real people who hadn’t gone to a restaurant in four years calling Trump. Zero lies there. It’s been just a matter of days since Trump declared a national emergency in the Capitol. During a press conference of the White House last week, Trump justified his decision by citing violent crime in the district. Since then, Trump has federalized DC’s police force and deployed the National Guard. So far, hundreds of National Guard troops have arrived in DC. But Trump didn’t stay on message for long during his amble. He moved on to other self-proclaimed accomplishments, like his expertise in grass. 

[clip of President Donald Trump] I know more about grass than any human being, I think, anywhere in the world. And we’re going to be regrassing all your parks, all brand new sprinkler systems, the best that you can buy, just like Augusta. It’ll look like Augusta, it’ll look like more importantly Trump National Golf Club. That’s even better. 

Jane Coaston: You know what? I do believe that Trump knows more about grass than anyone else. I think he should talk about grass, and only about grass for the next three and a half odd years. And that’s the news. [music break]

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Jane Coaston: That’s all for today. If you like the show, make sure you subscribe, leave a review, contemplate the apparent importance of the new Cracker Barrel logo, and tell your friends to listen. And if you’re into reading, and not just about how the chain restaurant has taken the barrel out of its logo and changed its interior decor and in response many on the right lost their damn minds, so much so that the company’s stock tanked, like me, What a Day is also a nightly newsletter. Check it out and subscribe at Crooked.com/subscribe. I’m Jane Coaston and everyone needs to take a minute. Go outside, pet a dog because it’s Cracker Barrel. [music break] What a Day is a production of Crooked Media. It’s recorded and mixed by Desmond Taylor. Our associate producer is Emily Fohr. Our video editor is Joseph Dutra. Our video producer is Johanna Case. We had production help today from Greg Walters, Matt Berg, Shawna Lee, and Gina Pollock. Our senior producer is Erica Morrison, and our senior vice president of news and politics is Adriene Hill. We had help with our headlines from the Associated Press. Our theme music is by Colin Gilliard and Kashaka. Our production staff is proudly unionized with the Writers Guild of America East. [music break]

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