Welcome to The Lost Debate, a show for Politically Ecclectics. I'm Ravi Gupta. And today, a little bit later in this episode, I'm sitting down once again with Adam Harris, who's a staff writer at the Atlantic. He's written some interesting books and articles over the years, including one about why colleges have always been unequal before the Atlantic. He was at the Chronicle of Higher Education. He is an

education expert. And today we're going to talk about the role of private equity, the child care

industry, and just the overall crisis in child care within this country. We kind of zoom out also

just to talk about private equity generally. But before we get there, I want to talk a little bit

about what we learned this week in the 2024 elections.

So Haley dropped out, Chief Phillips dropped out.

We are now officially in the general election.

And one thing that I'm going to do consistently once a month on this podcast is update

an index to say, well, how is this race going for each of the two major candidates,

Trump versus Biden, in this, what is likely to be the longest and nastiest general election

campaign in history? And I have come up with 10 questions that are going to be the top 10

key questions that are going to matter in this election.

And what I'm going to do in this podcast is I'm going to go to and explain each of these

questions.

And I'm going to tell you at this moment, which of these questions is answered in a way at this

moment that will help Trump or help Biden or neither of them.

And then I'll give you a tally. And what we'll do is every month we'll update our thinking on these to say, well, okay, who's winning the election right now, even beyond the polling? You know, the polling we know right now, which is a Trump has an advantage. The betting markets give Trump an advantage. But what are the long-term trends in this race or short and medium-term trends that

are going to play out from now until November? And so we've got 10 of them, and I'm going to do

them in reverse order. So meaning we're going to end with the most important trends. And we're

going to start with the trends that are less important. But all 10 of them are on here for a reason.

All of these are important trends. So number 10 question for this election is,

what impact will global issues have on this campaign? And we've got two big ones. We've got

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