Blocking

“Survivor 50” castaway Joe Hunter has made it to the final tribal council of the grueling competition show twice, but walked away with slim to none when it came to jury votes.

On Wednesday night, four-time “Survivor” player Aubry Bracco was crowned sole survivor and won the not $1-million but $2-million prize (thanks to a twist that involved a coin toss and MrBeast), and Jonathan Young came in second. Hunter, a firefighter and fan favorite, lost on an 8-3-0 vote.

According to Hunter, jury members had made up their minds before the remaining three castaways even had a shot to sweeten their chances at the final tribal council.

“I sit down in that chair for final Tribal, right? I’m thinking alright, here we go,” Hunter told “Entertainment Weekly.” “Right away, the second before any word was said, I went, ‘Oh, that one hates me, this one hates me, hate me, hate me, hate me.’ And I thought, ‘There’s zero chance.’”

Hunter was somewhat optimistic leading up to the tribal council and said that he thought some of the jury members had come with an open mind. “I’ll give credit to Emily, Rick Devens, Christian, Dee,” he said.

“I just felt it was very transparent based on the questions and responses that, before this thing started, I think it was a wrap.”

During the series finale, “Survivor” legend Cirie Fields put Hunter on blast, saying that castaways felt like they had to babysit him and jokingly calling it the “Joetation” when it was a player’s turn to sway Hunter to vote alongside them.

Hunter chalked up the babysitting remark to his own naivete when it came to being vulnerable with other players he thought were his friends on the island. “I just put that vulnerability in the wrong hands,” he told the outlet. “That’s really what it is. And that’s part of the game.”

Hunter also spoke with “Entertainment Tonight” and admitted that yes, he’d blocked a select few “Survivor” players on social media. “So, 751 players,” Hunter said, “yeah, there’s two.

“I’ll tell you this, each one of them is not random,” he said. “Actually, there’s three. It is not random. … All of which I would love to talk to and solve it, and have tried.”

Last week, former “Survivor” players Kelley Wentworth, who’s been a castaway three times, Savannah Louie, who won Season 49 and was on the same tribe as Hunter in Season 50, and Tiffany Ervin, who competed on Seasons 46 and 50, all said they’d been blocked by Hunter.

WASHINGTON — Democrats on Monday filed an emergency appeal with the U.S. Supreme Court seeking to halt a Virginia ruling invalidating a ballot measure that would have given their party an additional four winnable U.S. House seats.

The move came after the Virginia Supreme Court on Friday struck down a constitutional amendment that voters narrowly passed just last month. The 4-3 state court decision found that the Democratic-controlled legislature improperly began the process of placing the amendment on the ballot after early voting had begun in Virginia’s general election last fall.

Democrats argued unsuccessfully that the U.S. Supreme Court has held that, even if early voting is underway, an election does not happen until election day itself.

The appeal is the latest twist in the nation’s mid-decade redistricting competition. It was kicked off last year by President Trump urging Republican-controlled states to redraw their lines and was supercharged by a recent Supreme Court ruling severely weakening the Voting Rights Act.

“The Court overrode the will of the people who ratified the amendment by ordering the Commonwealth to conduct its election with the congressional districts that the people rejected,” wrote lawyers for Virginia Democrats and Democratic state Atty. Gen. Jay Jones. “The irreparable harm resulting from the Supreme Court of Virginia’s decision is profound and immediate.”

The filing is a sign of Democratic desperation after the Virginia decision. Democrats are still favorites to recapture the U.S. House of Representatives, but their GOP rivals have claimed to have gained more than a dozen seats through redistricting. The voter-approved Virginia map would have partly offset that.

Democrats are taking a legal long shot in asking the justices to reverse the Virginia court’s ruling. The Supreme Court tries to avoid second-guessing state courts’ interpretations of their own constitutions. In 2023, it turned down a request by North Carolina Republicans to overrule a state Supreme Court decision that blocked the GOP’s congressional map.

Politically, the appeal could help a party struggling to compete with Republicans in the unusual mid-decade redrawing of congressional boundaries by providing fodder for election-year messaging about a partisan Supreme Court. The court recently allowed Louisiana Republicans to proceed with redistricting after the justices struck down a majority Black district as an unconstitutional racial gerrymander.

Democrats have been set on their heels because, days after the Virginia ballot measure passed, the Supreme Court’s conservatives reversed decades of rulings and in effect neutered the Voting Rights Act, paving the way for Southern states to eliminate some majority Black districts and further pad Republican margins in Congress.

The Virginia amendment had been launched long before that ruling. It was intended as a response to Republican gains in Texas, Missouri, North Carolina and Ohio, and to blunt a new map in Florida that just became law. Once the Virginia amendment passed, it briefly turned the nationwide redistricting scramble into a draw between the two parties.

That was unraveled by the Virginia Supreme Court’s decision. The justices are appointed by the legislature, which has flipped between the two parties in recent decades, and the body is generally not seen as having a clear ideological bent.

Whitehurst writes for the Associated Press.