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?

Follow If You're Listening on the ABC Listen app.

Check out our series on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@IfYoureListeningABC

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.

Follow If You're Listening on the ABC Listen app.

Check out our series on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@IfYoureListeningABC

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

Follow If You're Listening on the ABC Listen app.

Check out our series on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@IfYoureListeningABC

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.

Follow If You're Listening on the ABC Listen app.

Check out our series on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@IfYoureListeningABC

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.

Follow If You're Listening on the ABC Listen app.

Check out our series on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@IfYoureListeningABC

Surprise! We're popping in on a Sunday to answer your questions, many of which were about goo and the Canadian state of Alberta this month.

Kara also tells Matt an incredible story from Russia during World War II — the Weekend at Bernie's-style odyssey that kept Vladimir Lenin's corpse safe. 

We're going to do this regularly, so if you have questions for Matt and Kara send them through as emails or voice notes, to [email protected].

And to ask Matt questions live as the US midterm election results roll in on November 4 at 3PM AEDT, subscribe to our brand new YouTube channel here: https://www.youtube.com/@IfYoureListeningABC

Follow If You're Listening on the ABC Listen app.

Donald Trump recently said that if his treasury secretary can’t get bond yields down, the next move might be the military. It sounds absurd, but the US bond market is the quiet foundation underneath almost every price in the global economy, from your mortgage to a company’s loan. When investors lose faith in a government’s ability to manage its money, as happened under the UK’s Liz Truss in 2022, bond yields spike, and borrowing gets more expensive for everyone, instantly. Trump’s tariffs, his war in Iran and his promised $5,000 dividend cheques have investors nervous all over again, and bond yields are climbing. Unlike Liz Truss, Trump has nobody above him to sack him over it. So who actually pays when the bond market loses faith in Donald Trump?

Follow If You're Listening on the ABC Listen app.

Check out our series on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLDTPrMoGHssAfgMMS3L5LpLNFMNp1U_Nq

Before we knew about El Niño, La Niña and the other patterns scientists now use to make long-range weather forecasts, there were men like Inigo Jones, whose prediction methods owed more to astronomy than to meteorology. Farmers, construction companies and brides-to-be all turned to these unorthodox weathermen, who charted the cycles of the planets and the spots on the surface of the sun.

Today, producer Jess O’Callaghan tells Matt about the wild west of weather forecasting, before we really knew how to do it.

Follow If You're Listening on the ABC Listen app.

Check out our series on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLDTPrMoGHssAfgMMS3L5LpLNFMNp1U_Nq

Toxic smoke haze is blanketing Malaysia, Singapore and the Philippines, after weeks of fires in Indonesia. In central Chile, flash flooding has trapped people on their roofs, and already Australia’s spring is unusually hot. Scientists have confirmed it’s an El Niño year, and it’s expected to be one of the worst on record, tipping the odds for these extreme weather events. But we haven’t always had this warning — in 1982 there was a whole heap of apocalyptic weather, and no unifying theory to bring it all together. That “super El Niño” would totally change how we think about forecasting the weather. Now climate change threatens to send us back to the 1980s.

Follow If You're Listening on the ABC Listen app.

Check out our series on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLDTPrMoGHssAfgMMS3L5LpLNFMNp1U_Nq

Over recent decades, Hezbollah has become deeply embedded in southern Lebanon. It runs everything from hospitals and schools to infrastructure projects, and even has its own theme park.

Naturally, when an email landed in our inbox from listener Alex who’s actually been to that theme park, we wanted to know every detail. So Matt gave him a call.

Follow If You're Listening on the ABC Listen app.

Check out our series on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLDTPrMoGHssAfgMMS3L5LpLNFMNp1U_Nq