Ezra Klein

The candidates on the stage tonight are, according to the polls, the five top Democratic candidates in this race.

Tom Steyer, Javier Becerra, Katie Porter, Matt Mahan, and Antonio Villaraigosa.

Give them a hand.

I should say we invited the top Republicans too.

Unfortunately, they could not make it tonight.

There have been, there have been a lot of debates lately, a lot of debates this week.

This is not one of them.

What we're doing here tonight is a forum and on one topic, a topic that deserves 90 minutes of our attention, which is California's housing crisis.

We're gonna have three sections.

Each section, I'm gonna spend about six minutes talking with each candidate in turn.

I'll ask follow-ups if we have time.

I wanna give people the opportunity to hear all of you thinking through these issues aloud.

At the end of that six minutes, a bell will sound like this.

That bell slightly breaks my heart.

I'm a podcast host.

I want to give you all 90 minutes each.

But you're going to get very mad at me if I don't keep this fair.

So we're going to try to keep it very fair.

We are asking candidates not to jump in or interrupt each other.

You are free to criticize each other in your answers.