If You're Listening

After Democrats declared a landslide win in the midterms, a narrative quickly formed online: Republicans’ aggressive redistricting strategy had spectacularly backfired…but the reality is more complicated. 
Years ago, Donald Trump pushed Texas Republicans to redraw their electoral map specifically to blunt the kind of wave that just hit them, and it worked exactly as designed, just not enough to survive a landslide. 
This time the strategy didn’t win them the election, but it meaningfully softened the damage, even as their own aggressive redistricting triggered a counter-gerrymander from Democrats that cost them ground elsewhere. So did the plan really fail, or did it just stop a landslide from being even bigger?
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The US midterm results are still coming in, but already, the Democrats have won the US House of Representatives and the Senate in a landslide. 
Surprisingly, in an interview on Fox News, Donald Trump said he will accept the results, saying the Democrats have “some good people” who “fought hard”, and that the Republicans lost because voters “didn’t like the candidates”. 
We did our first live stream on our brand new YouTube channel to watch the US midterm results come in live and take viewer questions, we had over 5300 people tune in from all over the world! So here are some of our favourite questions.
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It's US midterms eve, and since Matt hasn’t actually travelled to the US this election cycle, he's called up Four Corners reporter Mark Willacy. Mark has spent the last few weeks travelling across America, talking to voters and experts, including former FBI director James Comey and former CIA director John Brennan.
Mark and Matt talk about why some Republicans are bracing for a bad night, whether Donald Trump could interfere in the vote, and what a forecast Democratic win in Congress, and possibly the Senate, could mean for the next two years.
Watch Matt’s midterms livestream on the If You’re Listening YouTube channel at 3pm AEDT tomorrow: https://youtube.com/live/bgmZfIZD0aU
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In 2018, Israeli intelligence obtained a Hamas planning document outlining almost exactly how the October 7 attack would unfold. A more detailed version followed in 2022, and Egypt and the UAE both delivered direct warnings in the weeks before the attack. None of it stopped what Israelis call the worst single day in the country’s history. 
More than 1100 days later, Israel still hasn’t opened an independent inquiry into the attack, and Benjamin Netanyahu has rejected calls for one. His rival Gadi Eisenkot has promised to launch one immediately if he wins. So will Israel get a proper reckoning with October 7? It all comes down to a single election.
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In 1998, the Bananas in Pyjamas visited Moscow as part of a promotional tour. Things did not go to plan. Today, Eric Campbell, the ABC’s Russia correspondent at the time, joins Matt to try to piece together what really happened. Eric also talks about meeting Boris Yeltsin in a broom cupboard, the changing face of Russian media, and why Russian politicians took aim at Peppa Pig.
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