It wasn’t until Dan Pfeiffer and I sat down last Friday afternoon to tape the latest installment of my Impolitic podcast that I realized we hadn’t had a good long gab since Donald Trump reoccupied the White House in January—an unusually long gap in a running conversation that’s been going on for, yeesh, nearly 20 years now. So Dan and I would have had a lot of ground to cover even if he hadn’t just conducted a fired-up interview with California Governor Gavin Newsom about his audacious gambit to outflank his opposite number in Texas, Greg Abbott, in the battle over congressional redistricting that’s suddenly emerged as a defining, potentially chaos-unleashing conflict in the run-up to the 2026 midterms.