Good morning from Washington. I'm Chuck Todd and you're listening to the Chuck Todd cast

from Meet the Press. We're coming to you a little later than usual because we had another

double-header Democratic debate on Tuesday and Wednesday and we wanted to have the full picture

before we got into your feed. And now they are all blurry and overcaffeinated. So let's

get started. Today I'm joined by Annie Carney, the White House correspondent for The New

York Times and Doug Thornell, a Democratic strategist and former senior advisor at the DNC,

Annie and Doug. Welcome to the pod here. So it's easy to sit here and we're going to, I want to

get into the nitty gritty of the debate, but I also want to sort of set a table. I feel like we're

to beat up a cliche where at the end of the beginning. So phase one of the campaign was announcing,

phase two was planning your tent poles, sort of what lane do you want to run in, you want to

be a progressive one. Here's my plan for X, what? And now we're in the, we're now we're sorting it

out right now. We're in the campaign. And to me, that's what these debates introduced is that

we now see the dividing lines. And what I assume will be a much more heated campaign day to day

between all of the front runners. Annie, what's your takeaway from tonight? I think you're right

about that. We saw not just a Kamala Biden matchup over one issue. We saw all the candidates

taking hits at not just the front runner Biden, but at Harris, who emerged as a serious threat

last in the last debate. We saw in the first night, the moderates kind of taking on the

Burnian Warren. So we saw a lot of different fishers not just going after one front runner,

which I think also talks says something about the state of the race that it's kind of

any still anyone's race, but I'd still the front right of it. Anyone's race. It's also probably

the end of the beginning and that that's the last time we're going to see 20 candidates debating.

We're going to also go into the winnowing period, which I think everyone is really ready for at

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