EVERYONE IS NOW DUMBER.

I watched last week's gubernatorial debate, which Sean Hannity billed as a chance for viewers to compare and contrast populist and technocratic governing styles.  I will credit Mr Hannity for giving the principals, Florida governor Ron DeSantis for the populists and California governor Gavin Newsom for the technocrats, room to expand on their talking points.  In so doing, he addressed a criticism Ben Voth raised to the traditional presidential forums.

Journalist moderators have been chosen for these debates for decades. The problems with moderators are two-fold. First, journalists have come to occupy a prominent argumentative position in the debates. In the 1990s, journalist moderators would occupy roughly 5 percent of the speaking time in debates. In the most recent series, moderator Chris Wallace consumed more than 25 percent of the speaking time.

There are no established limits for moderator monologues about politics to which candidates are expected to respond. Secondly, journalist moderators indicate a pattern of favoritism toward the Democratic nominee.

That is the most annoying part of those performances.  The argumentative journalist offers a Complex Proposition going on for longer than the time limit the candidate is expected to respect.  Does it come as any surprise that under such circumstances the candidate might deflect or resort to tangentially salient talking points?  Make Sean Hannity moderator and claim he shows favoritism to the Republican, and Mr Newsom's behavior is true to the candidate form.

It does little good, dear reader, when nothing of substance gets said.  Reason's Eric Boehm has a Billy Madison moment of his own.

Though it was sold as a showdown between the chief executives of what may be America's most iconic "red" and "blue" states—and perhaps a preview of a presidential campaign next year or in 2028—the debate quickly devolved into a nearly unwatchable mess. The two men kept talking over one another while the moderator, Fox News host Sean Hannity, struggled to keep the conversation focused.

Newsom had little interest in engaging with the premise of the debate: which state had a better style of governance. It's hard to blame him for that. California is losing population, it has a higher unemployment rate than Florida, and its residents suffer under significantly higher taxes. The first 20 minutes of the debate consisted of Hannity teeing up those facts one after the next, letting DeSantis swing away, and then asking Newsom to explain why California seems to suck. That was never going to produce a productive discussion, and it didn't.

Instead, Newsom played the role of loyal Joe Biden surrogate—he started his very first answer of the night with "I'm here to tell the truth about the Biden/Harris record." And since he had little interest in defending his own track record, it quickly became obvious that Newsom was on the debate stage to rope-a-dope DeSantis into losing his cool and looking unserious.

He largely succeeded. "Ron, relax," he chuckled at one point near the end of the 90-minute affair, after hooking the Flordia governor into another loud and meaningless shoutfest.

About the best Mr Newsom could do was note that there's a net out-migration of Floridians to California.

Then it was time for a My Pillow commercial, and an opportunity to deploy a poop map for the Democrats' water-carriers to fact check.

Indeed, the very fact that Newsom was trying to argue that DeSantis was "a lockdown governor" says something pretty definitive about which side won that debate, doesn't it? Newsom can't fix his record on COVID, so his only option here was to try to make DeSantis seem equally bad.

DeSantis did eventually find his footing long enough to deliver a retort. "Gavin Newsom did huge damage to people in California. He ruined livelihoods," he said, in perhaps his strongest moment of the night. "We had our kids in school. He had the kids locked out of school because of the teachers union. That is having a generational impact."

Finally, there seemed to be an actual debate happening. One that involved contrasting visions for the relationship between Americans and their state governments. More of that would have been great! But it was time for a commercial break, and when the show resumed it moved on to more obviously partisan issues—guns, abortion, and how they feel about Biden's track record—where the two men's positions aren't as nuanced or illustrative as their responses to COVID.

At least some of the blame for the disappointing event must rest with Hannity, who simply tried to cover too much ground in a limited amount of time.

That's the nature of these moderated forums. Mr Hannity might have attempted to honor Mr Voth's suggestion about how better to have the candidates debate.

One of the best solutions for future debates would be to remove journalist moderators to create a more authentic debate event that features the candidates rather than an iterative press conference constrained by the narratives set by the American journalistic community. Non-journalist moderators could simply identify topics with single words — abortion, inflation, immigration, Gaza, government spending — and allow the extra time be given to candidates to explain their views.

Or, in the case of conflicting visions for state government, local control or federalism or taxation or stadium subsidies ought be topics, as might be state transportation policy.