All in With Chris Hayes 5/8/26 | 🅼🆂🅽🅱️🅲 Breaking News Today May 8, 2026

Added: 2026-05-09

[00:00:00]Now y'all can see, look at the mayhem.

[00:00:03]>> Alabama follows Tennessee back to Jim Crow as the will of the people is tossed aside in Virginia.

[00:00:11]>> The Virginia State Supreme Court has struck down the new congressional map that was approved by voters.

[00:00:16]>> Tonight, the rising stakes of Donald Trump's attempt to rig the system and what voters can do about it.

[00:00:23]>> Republicans have to win this one. We'll never lose a race. For 50 years, we won't lose a race.

[00:00:30]>> And the stunning price tag for war as our board president Joy rides in the pool.

[00:00:37]Mr. >> President, you are here against the backdrop of war in Iraq. Why focus on all these projects right now?

[00:00:43]>> You know why? Because I want to keep our country beautiful and safe.

[00:00:48]Plus, the independent candidate from Nebraska aiming to shake up the Senate map and the extraordinary new filing from ABC accusing the Trump administration of a constitutional breach.

[00:01:00]>> I think ABC is putting themselves in great jeopardy actually. You know, they've already paid me $16 million.

[00:01:08]>> But all in starts right now.

[00:01:14]>> Good evening from New York. I'm Chris Hayes. You know, the most dramatic thing that a judge or judges can do in a democracy is to just throw out the results of an election. That's a that's as serious as it gets, right? It's it essentially unheard of outside of really rare cases of fraud, right? Otherwise, you don't get to just throw out an election. I mean, the idea of one person or a small handful of people setting aside the will of the citizens, tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands, even millions of citizens, that's pretty alien to our democratic traditions. It just doesn't happen that much. That is what happened in the Commonwealth of Virginia today. Shockingly, appallingly really, the Supreme Court of that state ruled four to three to strike down the congressional redistricting plan that crucially had been approved by the state voters in a special election last month as we covered here at this desk with millions of people campaigning or showing up at the polls. It won 52 to 48%. Again, weeks of campaigning, millions of dollars spent on ads by both sides, a vigorous public debate, and the people came out, three million to the polls in that Virginia referendum, and a majority of the people said, "Yes, we want these new maps."

[00:02:26]And today, a panel of judges by the narrowest of margins, four to three, tossed that result out because they say of a technical issue with how that referendum got on the ballot, their interpretation of one word in a state statute. They didn't just block the new congressional map. They vetoed the election. And in so doing, they have also sent the American political system in to barreling back towards Jim Crow disenfranchisement.

[00:02:50]As we've been covering closely on the show, as you noted have been following, they have handed Republicans now a huge victory in the race to the bottom gerrymandering arms race that Trump started to stay in power. Donald Trump is afraid of losing his power in a free and fair election. He's very afraid of being impeached again. He said as much earlier this year on January 6th. In fact, >> you got to win the midterms because if we don't win the midterms, it's just going to be I mean, they'll find a reason to impeach me. Uh, I'll get impeached.

[00:03:28]>> Find a reason.

[00:03:31]At this point, it's harder to find reasons not to impeach him. And so Donald Trump came up with a plan to rig the midterms, a combination of gerrymandering Democrats out of their House seats in red states again in the middle of the decade when this is just never done. It's done every 10 years of the census, but screw that, right? So, they're going to do that and then pass this national bill that would be the most ownorous voter suppression law in American history. And he he was very clear about this, right? The point wasn't to persuade the median voter, the crossressured voter that they had the best agenda. No, it was these two means to barricade themselves into power. He explicitly said that the point was to engineer races where people can't vote Republicans out of office.

[00:04:18]I'll tell you what, Republicans have to win this one.

[00:04:22]>> We'll never lose a race for 50 years. We won't lose a race. We want voter ID. We want proof of citizenship.

[00:04:30]and we don't want mail-in ballots, >> right? So that that's the plan to change the way voting happens, to change the districts, to basically change the rules of the game rather than actually compete in the game. And while Republicans have yet to pass those voting restrictions into law, though they've tried, they have all across the country, with some notable exceptions like Indiana, other places, gone allin on Trump's gerrymandering plan. This, I can't stress this enough. This has never happened before. what we're seeing never there was one me mid uh decade redistricting in Texas under George W.

[00:05:04]Bush, that was a huge deal. But what we've seen at Trump's direction is that in red state after red state, they have been squeezing out blue districts. And in response to that, Democrats have countered to try to level the playing field to get things back to par, to get things back to even so that voters can actually decide who should be in Congress. In California and Virginia, Democrats in those states submitted plans for the new maps to the voters.

[00:05:30]They didn't just ram them through. They said, "Look, this is our proposal." They went to the voters and in both states the voters said yes. What a novel idea.

[00:05:38]What a novel idea. Giving the voters a say in all this in how districts are drawn, how maps are drawn, in who represents them. The voters saying the voters. Have you heard of them? That's the thing Republicans are trying to destroy.

[00:05:55]Keep in mind, we already have evolved into a constitutional system that right now, as I speak to you, is deeply structurally biased against one party, the Democrats. It's biased against them in the Senate, where 39 million Californians get the same number of senators as 600,000 people in Wyoming.

[00:06:11]You ever stop and think like, why is there a North and a South Dakota?

[00:06:16]It's biased against them in the electoral college, where smaller, more rural states with winner take all rules favor Republicans. It is why If you've been paying attention over the last several decades of American politics, we have had not one but two elections in the past seven where the Republican candidate won despite getting fewer votes than their opponent. In every other race in the entire country, the person with more votes wins in every single one except one.

[00:06:46]Now, in this system that has evolved to be structurally biased towards Republicans, the one place where popular sentiment generally gets transferred most directly is, you guessed it, the House of Representatives. And so now, Republicans are trying to electoral collegeify and Jim Crowify the House. So that Democrats need to win by two or four or six points nationally just to get the same number of seats as Republicans to open up the possibility of an election like 2000 or 2016 in which more people vote for Democrats but Republicans still maintain the majority.

[00:07:23]That is an unbelievably dangerous situation, right? It's the potential difference between a do nothing Congress that continues to bow to an aspiring king and a truly representative body that restores some semblance of sanity and accountability. But deeper than that, it's the difference between us having a democracy or not.

[00:07:44]And yet, despite all this, Virginia Supreme Court reinforced that Republican advantage today. Again, they vetoed the voters. You don't see it that much. You don't see courts just go like that to an election that much.

[00:07:57]No. to 1.6 million voters in their state. No to a last stitch attempt at parody, fairness, and justice. Now, the court's majority was wrong. I think they were actually wrong on the technical meaning of the law. If you read their opinion in the descent, the descent has a better part of it.

[00:08:13]But this is part of an insane im asymmetry between how democratically controlled states and Republican controlled states have been treating this redistricting arms race that Donald Trump started. Right? On one side, Democrats are going through procedure after procedure, right? They got initiatives, they changed the maps, then they got initiatives on the ballots, then they had to run a campaign, then they had to go to the voters, and they had to pass the new maps. On the other side, as Semaphore puts it, Republicans are simply not limited by so many small D democratic restrictions. They just convene their legislators, which themselves, by the way, are highly gerrymandered to begin with, that have these like insane 8020 uh majorities, and then that gerrymandered state legislature rams through a new gerrymandered congressional map.

[00:09:01]like in Tennessee where Republicans yesterday took the state's last majority minority district in Memphis, a congressional district that has existed since 1923 because obviously there's a district that represents one of the largest cities in the state and cracked it into pieces in order to give Republicans every house seat in the state. They did this while hundreds of people protested outside.

[00:09:25]>> People have died to be able to have representation and they are stealing it.

[00:09:31]They are changing the laws midame and trying to take away the voice of people and these voices matter.

[00:09:37]>> It's illegal and it just shows you how hellbent they are on taking away the black voice in Memphis.

[00:09:43]>> Oh, they're not done. No, no, they're not done. They did it in Alabama today, too. They kept the get this. They kept the state house open through a tornado evacuation. Okay, the state was being evacuated because there was a tornado.

[00:09:58]There were leaks happening in the building.

[00:10:00]This is a state that's got its fair share of problems. It ranks near the bottom in a whole host of things. But no, they stuck to their guns. You hear that siren in the background? And in a building being evacuated, they got together to approve a map that eliminates one of the two majority black districts.

[00:10:20]It really just just hurts me and it just just disturbs me that we're at this point in 2026, an entirely new century. And then we're still arguing over who has the right to have rights.

[00:10:34]>> Then of course there's Louisiana. Last week the Supreme Court basically killed off what was left of the Voting Rights Act. It gave that state's Republicans cart blanch to draw a new map. Now that election, the primary election had already started. 40,000 people had already voted.

[00:10:50]The governor declared a state of emergency. He declared a state of emergency because he didn't like what was happening in the vote. Today, the state legislature opened public hearings to consider maps that would just happen to eliminate one or both of Louisiana's majority black districts. You get the pattern here, right? One after another so that there's no black members of Congress left in the states of the old Confederacy.

[00:11:16]One state senator called them out on it while hearing testimony from the only four black people to represent the state in the house since reconstruction.

[00:11:26]We have over 4.4 million people in the state. A third are African-American.

[00:11:32]This is a former slave state. Since the end of slavery, these four gentlemen have represented us in Congress. That's it. And now we want to reduce that. My public comment is anger. This upsets me.

[00:11:44]How do we not focus on race?

[00:11:47]>> Think about that, right? It's the blackest part of the whole country.

[00:11:51]States of the old South. Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama, South Carolina.

[00:11:56]You see the trend?

[00:11:59]Donald Trump's plan isn't to win over voters. It's to win elections in perpetuity by blocking voters ability to have a say, choosing your voters, moving them around like pieces on a board instead of letting them choose you. And it only works if Republicans and systematically disenfranchise black voters in the American South.

[00:12:23]They want a new Jim Crow. They're very explicit about it. They're hard at work trying to make it happen. And now they have a blessing from the Supreme Court.

[00:12:31]Jamie Harrison of course served as the chair of the DNC from 2021 to 2025. Now hosts the at our table podcast. Tim Miller is a former RNC spokesman, now host of the Bolt Work podcast. They join me now. Um Jimmy, I think you can tell from the tenor that uh how how enraging I find all this. Um how frustrating. I think a lot of people feel that way. I think there's a there's a sense of like okay what what now? And as someone who has come up through temp politics in the south in South Carolina, particularly in black politics in the south, and who has also been at the DNC during a midterm, like how are you thinking of that question when people are asking you that today? I'm sure you're getting texts.

[00:13:10]>> Yeah. Well, Chris, thank you for one using your platform to highlight this because it on a personal note, it's really really important. And what I'm about to say, I say not as the the former chair of the DNC or the first black person to be chair of the South Carolina Democratic Party. I say this as a black American who grew up here in the South. You know, South Carolina was the gateway of enslaved people coming this country. 40% came through the port of Charleston. Um, and after the Civil War, we saw an explosion of black power in the state. This state, we had a majority black legislature. We had a black speaker of the house, a black lieutenant governor, a black attorney general. At one time, South Carolina sent four out of the five members of Congress they sent to Washington DC was black. And then Jim Crow happened. And it took a hundred years to go from the number eight black person to serve in Congress from South Carolina to number nine. And that was Jim Clber.

[00:14:05]>> And what we are seeing now is a reversal of all of that. The Voting Rights Act was supposed to be the medicine that cured America of the cancer of Jim Crow.

[00:14:17]But what we are seeing right now, Chris, is piece by piece, the Supreme Court has weakened that medicine while pretending that the disease is gone. There's a reason why Donald Trump said, "Make America great again." Because there's a time in which America was not that great. And it was a time in which my people uh my my grandparents who lived under Jim Crow could not always vote weren't always considered whole people.

[00:14:41]And now we are feverishly going back to that moment. So I'm sick to to to my my spirit I is is hurting is in pain right now. And I hope folks understand that this is bigger than just whether Democrats or Republicans win. This is about whether or not people in this country that were brought here as enslaved folks actually get an opportunity to live up to those words of our founders that all people are created equal and that our voices matter just as much as anybody else.

[00:15:12]>> You know, Tim, the the the the sort of the two examples that I've had in my head um are Wisconsin and Hungary. And the reason I have those two examples in my head because those are two places in which the ruling party in Wisconsin, the Republican party came up with this like crazily aggressive gerrymander. It kind of locked them into power for a long time. It even when they were like, you know, losing majorities in the the popular vote, they would manage to sort of stay in power. And what happened in that state, Ben Wickler, state chair, they they kind of went through the process of building statewide majority coalitions big enough to start to unwind some of that. And we've seen the same thing in Hungary. And it's sort of an annoying answer to be like, well, you just have to win big enough. But I don't see any other answer at this point.

[00:15:57]>> Yeah. Well, that it takes time. And look, there's still kind of things reverberating from that in Wisconsin now. I mean, the Republicans still in the state legislature in Wisconsin have a disproportionate representation um to to their vote share. But look, I I guess I'll be negative first and then and then give you what I think the only option out of this is. Um I I shared your rage from the intro. Uh one thing I'd add to it is as courts have canceled two elections or you basically overturned they've overturned the one election that you focused on in Virginia. Uh but they nullified the votes of about 42,000 people here in Louisiana as well. In addition to that, we should say uh people had already voted absentee where I live in Louisiana based on the current maps. the election had started and as a result of the Supreme Court ruling the the governor by executive order called an emergency stopped the stopped the vote basically >> stopped the count >> and so now yeah so now that's what we're now they're going to try to redraw the maps to try to draw out you know one of the two majority minority representatives here so that's happening here and in Tennessee you know what is happening is is just unbelievable uh an affront to the law and the idea that they're cutting up Memphis it's illegal for them to make a decision based on race and they just so happen cut up Memphis a third, a third, a third. The black voters in Memphis are cut up equally into three districts. Like, how else do you describe what's happening?

[00:17:15]And and in Tennessee now, Nashville and Memphis won't have any representation.

[00:17:19]So, what's that? I How do you overcome that with democracy? I understand people who are frustrated with that. I I think the opportunity pointing to to Hungary and and Wisconsin is if people are pissed off enough about this and if Donald Trump keeps screwing up as much as he is, I do expect there'll be a landslide in November and it maybe not won't turn out as big as it could have been because of the ways that they were trying to to jerryrig the system. But um but that is the only way out of it and I don't that's probably cold comfort for people of Memphis and who aren't going to have any representatives and somebody either here in New Orleans or in Baton Rouge. But but like that's that's it right now.

[00:17:54]>> Yeah. And and Jamie, you were nodding your head and I remember talking to Ben Wickler, who is the state party chair in Wisconsin when he was hatching the plan to kind of undo the sort of democratization that had happened in his state. And he had this multi-art plan. I remember walking him through. It's like we got to win this state supreme court and then we got to win this state supreme court and then they can we can get new maps and fair maps and then we can and and and I think like that's got to be the plan here, right? There's got to be a law. Like the old constitutional order is getting ripped up by Donald Trump.

[00:18:25]>> So it's like you you got to win a big majority and then have a plan for what comes after it.

[00:18:31]>> Well, we have to win a big majority. We got to get the the House and the Senate back. And then we can't be uh we can't be memouth as my grandma used to say. We got to be bold in terms of pushing the agenda that we know that's necessary to protect this democracy. You know, Chris, history teaches us that democracy rarely disappears all at once. It erodess piece by piece, district by district, right up until it's time for pe when people decide that they're going to fight for it. And so it really, we need the American people, we need, and I'm speaking to black folks right now, we need you all to really stand up and fight for this. We need allies in our party uh to stop talking about all of the other nonsense and focus on the thing that is at hand right now that we are seeing something that we have not seen since the 1800s. So, we need folks to focus and fight back. And then we need our candidates to be bold. It is no time to to try to take the you know, we're going to be bipartisan. The Republicans don't care anything about damn being bipartisan at this moment.

[00:19:33]You got to be bold and do the things that we know is right to do.

[00:19:37]>> You know, you live Tim last question here just about the sort of coalitional politics of this. You're talking about me Memphis and Nashville and obviously this is directed at black voters, but there's a lot of non-black voters, a lot of white folks, a lot of all kinds of people who live in these cities who are having their representation taken. Like Nashville doesn't have a congressman.

[00:19:52]Memphis doesn't. They're they're trying to get rid of part of Louisiana like of New Orleans or you know and and and only have like there's a lot of people who should have an investment in this across all kinds of lines of difference to be able to have a say for your community.

[00:20:08]>> Yeah. And I and look I I think Georgia is a good example of this about how to push back against it. I I you know I mean look at the kind of coalition that you're talking about this coalition politics. How did the Democrats take back Georgia have a a Jewish and a black senator uh for the first time? Uh it was big turnout among black voters who were upset. Uh Stacy Abrams obviously organizing. It also included a lot of like former Republican voters who were upset about Donald Trump in the Atlanta suburbs that weren't weren't happy with the way that the the party was going. Um that that same coalition is going to have to get together and maybe on top of that reaching out to rural voters and rural and rural white voters who are unhappy with the way Donald Trump's growing out the farm economy. you know, and I wish that there was a a you know, a more grand strategy I could offer than that kind of just rank politics, but that's it. Like that's the coalition in the South to win back some of these districts.

[00:20:56]>> Jamie Harrison and Tim Miller, appreciate you both, gentlemen. Thank you.

[00:21:00]>> Thank you.

[00:21:00]>> Coming up, Congressman Adam Smith on where we stand on Trump's very, very costly Iran mess next.

[00:21:10]>> Donald Trump and his administration have been lying about just about everything having to do with this war from the beginning. One of the things they really clearly seem to be lying about is the cost. Remember last week Pentagon officials claimed the Warner has cost 25 billion so far. But I think there's good reason to be skeptical. An analysis in the newsletter Popular Information estimated the cost was closer to 72 billion for just the first 60 days or an average about $1.2 billion a day, which is in line with the estimates the Pentagon itself was giving several months ago. In today's New York Times, economist Justin Wolfers tallied up the true long-term cost. That's the total inclusive cost. Writing, "My math suggests the Iran War will cost hundreds of billions of dollars and very possibly trillions." Congressman Adam Smith is a Democrat of Washington State and also the ranking member on the House Armed Services Committee and he knows a thing or two about budgets in the Pentagon. He joins me now. Congressman, good to have you.

[00:22:02]>> Good to see you, Chris. Thanks for the chance.

[00:22:04]>> So, let's just start with that number. I I the 25 billion sounded low to me. It's lower than what the estimate was to begin with. They were talking about $200 billion. Um, is are people right to be skeptical that that's the actual figure?

[00:22:17]>> 100%. I mean, and there's two layers to this. One is just the actual costs to the Pentagon of this war and that's munitions expended. That's the operations and maintenance cost of having I think we're up to 60,000 of our US forces in the region, countless ships, all that goes into that. One thing really underounted in that is equipment that's been destroyed. Um, we know that we lost two C130s during the rescue mission for our downed airmen in Iran. Those are like $110 million a copy. Plus, we've seen a lot of damage at just about every single base that we have in the Middle East. Radars destroyed, um, planes destroyed in some cases. So, the cost there is much higher. But the truly staggering cost of this is the broader economic cost. We certainly see that in the price of oil here. But globally um we are talking about reductions in GDP for several dozens of countries. Um it's having a profound economic cost. I mean gas now I saw in Washington states up over $6 a gallon. So that cost and economists will be better at that than I am. That cost is probably in the hundreds of billions if not trillions and the actual cost of the Pentagon's pushing up close to a hundred billion right now. And as you well know this is very very far from being over.

[00:23:31]>> Wait, you just had a number. You you think the act again we sort of distinguish between what we call maybe direct budgetary costs and indirect costs but you you think direct budgetary cost that number is closer to hundred billion than 25.

[00:23:44]>> Sure. I mean going back I mean they told us I think a week or two into it that it was like somewhere between$1 and2 billion a day. All right. And the bombing campaign went on for what like 40 days roughly something like that. Um and that didn't count the destroyed equipment or again the operation and maintenance costs that have gone on even during the ceasefire and also we have expended munitions during said ceasefire as well. So yeah, you're probably pushing up close to 100 billion.

[00:24:11]>> Uh you mentioned the the the economic cost which is the sort of other thing category which a larger category and it also hits more people you know. Um the the gas uh price today we've got the national average at four four $4.54 uh a gallon a week ago. You can see it was 439. So like that keeps going up. It was 29 298 started the war. Uh the New York Times reporting to that Shell reported a nearly $7 billion profit among unprecedented disruption. It does seem like if there's cost for lots of people, the oil companies are going to like be printing money. And I do wonder if there's some windfall profits tax or something where there's some movement between their windfall profits and everyone else's cost.

[00:24:55]>> I mean, there should be. Look, I mean, I could go off down a rabbit hole the of the something for nothing nature of American politics that Trump has dove right in. He's promising free stuff to everybody. I mean, they they criticize Mandani in New York for it. No one has given away more money for nothing than than Donald Trump. So yes, the economic unreasonleness of starting a war and doing all this other stuff while cutting taxes all over the place, but there's two other important pieces to this. You focused on the cost, but you know what the Trump administration has tried to say is, "Yeah, but think of the benefit." But the problem is their benefit is assuming Iran had a nuclear weapon, which they didn't, by the way.

[00:25:31]And somehow what he's doing now and all this cost is making it less likely that they will when the exact opposite is true. Okay? They didn't have a nuclear weapon and now they're off the negotiating table and they found a leverage point and that leverage point is the straight of hormuz. So right now all this fight over getting in negotiations and you're absolutely right. Trump is lying about this every other day and I can't believe that Wall Street and the media keep falling for it. I mean it's it's it's Lucy Charlie Brown and the football every single day we have a deal. Iran is capitulating.

[00:25:59]No, they're not. Every single day it seems like Trump gets away with saying that. They're not. What Iran is saying right now is pay us open the straight.

[00:26:07]Okay, so basically at this point the benefit is just trying to get back to where we were when the war started and for the straight being open and now we're going to have to pay or someone's going to have to pay Iran to do this.

[00:26:19]Now Trump's argument is if we just keep the pressure up, if we just keep the um blockade up, then eventually Iran will cave. But there's a CIA analysis just came out in the paper saying that's months. All right, that's months before they would cave. And then the whole rest of the world is paying for our war and they're going to be more inclined to be supportive of Iran because of that. And also because of something that I heard Admiral McCraven say incredibly well at a dinner I was at in Los Angeles last week. Meanwhile, we are insulting, humiliating, belittling, and pushing away all of our allies and even our non-allies in the world so that they're not sympathetic to us. So how are we going to hold that pressure on Iran when Trump is making the whole rest of the world hate us?

[00:27:02]Congressman Adam Smith who's ranking member of the House Armed Services Committee. Thanks for your time tonight, sir.

[00:27:07]>> Thanks, Russ.

[00:27:08]>> Still ahead, while Republicans try to hold control by any means necessary, independent Don Dan Osborne on his push for a Senate seat Nebraska, one of the most fascinating races in the entire country. And he will join me next.