The Speech and Debate Club will host the third-annual State Debates in Mississippi State University’s Lee Hall later this month. The event is a debate between the following campus organizations: College Republicans, College Democrats and the Young Americans for Liberty. It will start at 6 p.m. Oct. 30 in Lee Hall’s Bettersworth Auditorium.
The topics will focus around hot button issues this midterm election cycle, such as foreign trade policy. Starkville Mayor Lynn Spruill will be a guest speaker at the event.
State Debates originated as a 2016 presidential election issue debate between the same clubs, but it has now taken on a life of its own as a standalone event to help raise political awareness on campus.
Josh McCoy, president of the Speech and Debate Club, spoke about the club’s role in the debate.
“We don’t want either of the political parties on campus, like College Dems, College Republicans or the Young Americans for Liberty to be the ones that host the debate because it seems like it brings partiality to it,” McCoy said. “Speech and Debate—it’s half of our name… Basically, we host it. We provide the moderators. We provide any assistance that is needed to facilitate it, and we also come up with the questions about what is going to be talked about.”
The topics and questions are conceived by Speech and Debate through discussion within the club. This year, the three main sources of questions are private versus public education policy, foreign trade policy and ideas from the audience. Speech and Debate will field questions from the audience by allowing attendees to submit ideas in the foyer of Bettersworth Auditorium prior to audience members going to their seats. The moderators will then sift through and refine these ideas into concise questions. Speech and Debate wants to focus these questions on problems Mississippi is facing.
Additionally, the moderators will preface each new topic with a succinct summary of recent events or background needed to better understand the questions.
Julia Rachel Kuehnle is the event director of the debate and also its creator. Kuehnle saw a need for political education and involvement on campus during 2016’s presidential election, so she decided to help create the State Debates.
“I saw a need on campus for students to be informed, because a lot of people had just turned it off, at that point,” Kuehnle said. “They didn’t want to hear anymore about it. (They thought,) ‘I don’t want to vote for either, so I’m just not going to vote.’ I didn’t want them to think like that. I wanted them to see that, yes, this is the face of the candidate and what they are saying, but there’s a lot more to the party, as a whole.”
Kuehnle emphasized that State Debates is an educational venture, focusing on informing the public of the values and ideas underpinning the political parties in American. This year, Kuehnle said she is personally excited to see more controversial topics being discussed, which she hopes will lead to an overall livelier debate.

Gallery • 1 Photos

State Debates Infographic