Welcome to the West Debata Show for Political Ecclectics. I'm Ravi Gupta. And shortly we're going to hear from two separate reporters on two different issues. We're going to talk about what's happening all around the states around the country, including state legislation, races, which just aren't getting a lot of coverage, but are going to be really important. And then we're going to talk about child care and some really bad policy on child care and what it tells us about our politics around some of these really important issues.

But as we do now, let's talk about some of the more timely issues happening here.

And let's start with these debates.

So right now, Trump and Biden are ostensibly preparing for the debates on June 27th. These are the

earliest debates we have ever had. This one is going to be moderated by CNN, anchors, Jake

Tapper, and Dana Bash. It'll run approximately 90 minutes with two commercial breaks. And this will be

the first of two scheduled debates between the candidates. Second will happen maybe on

September 10th. The structure of this one will be a little different, you know, outside of just the

timing. Microphones will be muted throughout the debate except for when the candidates speak so that

it'll be harder to interrupt. And they will appear without a live audience and the lecterns will be determined by a coin flip.

We're going to do more on this, but these debates are going to be really important because they're going to frame the summer, right?

Who's going to be in damage control coming out of the debates?

Who's going to be exceeding expectations?

And expectations are the name of the game here. Expectations are

everything. For those of you who are old enough to remember, one of the most memorable debates we've

ever had are the debates between George W. Bush and Al Gore. That was a nail-biter of a race,

and those debates, in my opinion, really mattered. Going into those debates, the Gore team totally

mishandled expectations. The sort of message out there, both from Gore and his supporters,

was that George W. Bush was dumb, that Al Gore was like a seasoned debater, debate champion,

and strategists for George W. Bush, like Karl Rove, were feeding into that perception being like,

hey, we'll be lucky to even hang with this guy who's a master at the craft of debating.

And what wound up happening was, you know, objectively, who knows, like if you were just scoring

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