Welcome to The Lost Debate, a show for Politically Ecclectics.

I'm Robbie Gupta and today we welcome on Russell Shaw, who is the head of school at Georgetown Day School.

And I can't remember the last time, if ever, I had on a private school leader.

I've had so many public K to 12 leaders, whether it's charter or a traditional public school.

But I wanted to talk to somebody who has,

you know, different kind of students, different kind of challenges. And we talk about a lot, you know,

for all parents out there, like how to prepare your kid to get into elite colleges, the changing

nature of high school, use of technology, artificial intelligence, independence. Like, this is

very much an extension of the

Lenora-Skinese conversation, et cetera. So we'll get to that. But before I do, let's talk about

early vote. I've seen so many claims out there about what the early vote has meant so far in this

election. And I think, honestly, there's just a lot of exaggerations, inappropriate use of

data. But in some cases, people are nailing the trend right. And let me give a couple of caveats as we

start. Number one, as Harry Anton said, there's a graveyard of people out there trying to predict

the eventual result in election based on early vote. But the early vote can tell us something about

what's going on here. And I mentioned this, I think, a week or two ago, but the early,

the early vote should be different this time in 2024 than it was in 2020. We were in a middle of a

pandemic last time. Trump was telling his people not to turn out. So the combination of those two things,

meaning the differences between how Democrats and Republicans treated the pandemic, combined with

what Trump was saying, depressed early vote and absentee balloting, which we kind of roll in together

with early vote, mail-in balloting, et cetera. It depressed GOP use of those tools. Some people think that might have contributed to Trump's

loss. So we'll keep that in mind as we analyze trends. You should not expect the trends to be the

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