Everybody, it's David Plough. Welcome to Campaign HQ. We are getting deeper into election

22, and today we're going to take our focus to the state of Texas. We are going to talk

about a state that has two, maybe three key house races. It has a marquee governor's race,

and of course, the discussion always, particularly when we get into presidential years, is when

if Texas is going to turn blue, because obviously if it did with 30 electoral votes, it would fundamentally

change the electoral college. So we're going to go deep into Texas. First, with Evan Smith, I'm sure a

lot of you know, Evan, he's now the CEO of the Texas Tribune has been covering Texas politics

for decades, knows the state geographically, demographically inside and out, knows all the

candidates on the ballot exceedingly well. So we're going to talk to Evan about the governor's race,

about some of the key house races. But I also want to talk to Evan about that question. What is

the trajectory of Texas? What would it take for Democrats to potentially turn Texas blue,

and we'll go deep into demographics and geographics and electoral patterns with Evan. I think

you'll learn a lot from him. And now we're going to spend some time with Nick Rathode, who is the

campaign manager for better or work. Beto was obviously a special political talent, really caught

the nation's imagination back in 2018 in his race with Ted Cruz, which was decided by less than three

points. We're going to talk about the governor's race with Nick, what they're seeing on the ground,

early vote has started, what we should take away from that, and how they might piece together a

winning coalition. Polls in this race have been all over the place as they are in a lot of places.

They consistently have had Abbott up. Some of them have had the race narrowing three, four, five point

lead for Abbott. Some have had the Abbott lead closer to double digits. So we'll talk to Nick about

what they're seeing on the ground, and what we'll take in these closing days for that race to

really tighten and give Democrats a chance to win the governor's race, which has eluded them

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