Next year’s presidential election is poised to move from the political pages to the nation’s living rooms next month as the contest for the Republican nomination reaches that modern milestone of the race’s first full-fledged debate.

Up to this point, there’s been plenty of jockeying for position by more than a dozen candidates, with President Joe Biden and former President Donald Trump sucking up most of the oxygen.

But amid all the campaigning, from fundraising and endorsements to candidate appearances and some advertising in early primary states, there’s something about aspiring Oval Office occupants facing off on stage under the glare of national attention, testing their mettle against each other, that signals the next phase of the seemingly never-ending campaign has begun.

During the nearly 50 years since nationally televised debates first became a fixture in the race for the White House, Colorado has been home to one of each variety. The state has served as the host location for a Democratic primary debate, a Republican primary debate and the pinnacle of the species, a presidential debate between the two major parties’ nominees.

It’s unknown whether Colorado will land a debate this cycle, though it appears unlikely, since the state isn’t considered up for grabs in 2024 after sliding solidly into the Democratic column for the last four presidential elections.

The Commission on Presidential Debates, which has organized presidential and vice presidential debates since the late 1980s, plans to release the 2024 general election debate schedule sometime this fall.

So far, just one Republican presidential primary debate has been announced, with two more penciled in.

Debate season is getting off to a later start than usual this cycle, potentially bringing more attention to the inaugural event once it unfolds on Aug. 23 in Milwaukee.

Although details are to be determined, the second primary debate is supposed to take place in September at the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library in Simi Valley, California. The third primary debate is rumored to be planned for sometime in October in Alabama.

As has been customary for decades, the incumbent seeking reelection – Biden this time around and Trump in the previous cycle – skips debating their primary challengers, letting the out-party have it out.

While Trump faces at least a dozen declared Republican challengers, his status as a former president and his commanding lead in nearly every poll could throw a wrinkle in recent tradition if he decides to sit out the primary debates, as he’s suggested he might.

As it stands, Trump’s rivals are scrambling to satisfy fundraising, polling and other criteria – including pledging to support the party’s eventual nominee – established by the Republican National Committee for an invitation to appear at Milwaukee’s Fiserv Forum in the crucial swing state of Wisconsin. Set to air on Fox News, the Aug. 23 debate will be moderated by channel’s Bret Baier and Martha MacCallum.

It could be a while before the final line-up is known, but candidates who say they have or will soon qualify for the debate include Trump, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, South Carolina Sen. Tim Scott, former South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley, businessman Vivek Ramaswamy, former New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie, former Arkansas Gov. Asa Hutchinson, North Dakota Gov. Doug Burgum and Miami Mayor Francis Suarez. The RNC has said the threshold will rise for subsequent debates, likely thinning the herd.

Colorado has been there, though it’s been a while.

The state witnessed its premier presidential primary debate in 1992, just days before voters cast ballots in the state’s first-ever presidential primary.

That year, some powerhouse Democrats – chiefly New York Gov. Mario Cuomo – had passed on challenging Republican President George H.W. Bush, whose popularity soared in the year before the election following the country’s victory in the Persian Gulf War.

While Bush faced an unexpectedly strong primary challenge of his own from conservative commentator Patrick Buchanan, most of the action by the time Colorado held its primary election in early March was on the Democratic side.

Falling on what was dubbed Mini Super Tuesday – a week before the more crowded Super Tuesday, dominated by southern states – Colorado was among seven states voting on March 3, on the heels of split decisions in the Iowa caucuses and the New Hampshire primary, leaving no clear frontrunner.

After decades of expressing its presidential nominating preferences at precinct caucuses, Colorado established a primary starting in 1992 in hopes of drawing attention to the state.

It worked.

The five leading Democratic candidates – former Sen. Paul Tsongas of Massachusetts, Sen. Tom Harkin of Iowa, former Gov. Jerry Brown of California, Gov. Bill Clinton of Arkansas and Sen. Bob Kerrey of Nebraska. – descended on Colorado in the weeks leading up to the primary. Coloradans nearly all cast ballots on Election Day in 1992, more than 20 years before the state’s adoption of all-mail voting.

Seen as a key prize in the early primary calendar, Colorado enjoyed unprecedented attention as all five Democrats criss-crossed the state, pressing the flesh as their campaigns flooded the airwaves with political ads, with a televised debate punctuating the chase for votes.

Held on stage at the Denver Auditorium Theater on the Saturday before the primary, Feb. 29 – a Leap Day – the 90-minute debate was sponsored by KUSA-TV and the Rocky Mountain News, moderated by news anchor Ed Sardella with KUSA reporter Jennifer Romm and the Rocky’s editor, Jay Ambrose, and editorial page editor, Vince Carroll, posing questions.

The “angry and emotional” debate – that’s how the Washington Post characterized it – covered a wide range of topics, from nuclear power to the environment, from competing proposals to simplify the tax system to Clinton’s emerging reputation for playing loose with the truth.

In an upset that would prove to be a high point of his campaign, Brown finished first in Colorado’s primary, a couple of points ahead of Clinton, with Tsongas close behind and the others further back.

Two decades later, when Colorado was considered the quintessential swing state, it was the undisputed center of the political universe for one night on Oct. 3, 2012. That’s when President Barack Obama and his Republican challenger, former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney – before his election to the U.S. Senate from Utah – met on stage inside the University of Denver’s Ritchie Center for that election’s first presidential debate.

An estimated 67 million Americans tuned in for the 90-minute debate, which was devoted to domestic policy and moderated by PBS’s Jim Lehrer.

Following days of pageantry and hoopla all around town, dozens of A-list political luminaries descended on DU that night to watch and spin what is mostly remembered as Obama’s stumble out of the gate, when a feisty Romney kept the incumbent on his heels for nearly the entire debate, briefly panicking his supporters amid what appeared to be a neck-and-neck race.

DU political science professor Seth Masket suggested immediately after the debate that Obama’s poor performance might not cast as gloomy of a shadow as some feared.

“We know that presidential debates don’t necessarily have a huge effect on voters – at the most, it’s like 2 or 3 points, but we’re in an election where the margin could be considerably less than that, so something that could swing something by that much could be determinative,” he said, adding that the debate was all about trying to reach the still-undecided sliver of an exceedingly polarized electorate.

The last time Colorado was host to a presidential-level debate was Oct. 28, 2015, when the third of the 2016 cycle’s dozen Republican primary debates took place at the Coors Events Center on the University of Colorado’s Boulder campus. Branded “Your Money, Your Vote” by sponsor CNBC, the debate was split into a main event and an undercard, featuring 10 candidates who satisfied polling criteria in prime time and another four who fell short taking the stage two hours earlier.

In addition to Trump and Christie, who are running again eight years later, the headliners were Florida Gov. Jeb Bush, surgeon Ben Carson, Texas Sen. Ted Cruz, former Hewlett-Packard CEO Carly Fiorina, former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee, Ohio Gov. John Kasich, Kentucky Sen. Rand Paul and Florida Sen. Marco Rubio. Filling the undercard slots were South Carolina Sen. Lindsey Graham, Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal, former Pennsylvania Sen. Rick Santorum and former New York Gov. George Pataki.

Both portions of the debate – spanning more than four hours total and derided as a “cage match” by Cruz – were ostensibly devoted to the economy but left candidates and viewers alike complaining that moderators John Harwood, Carl Quintanilla and Becky Quick were unusually combative and kept veering off topic. Other than souring the RNC on CNBC’s sister operation NBC News, which lost host status for a later debate, the face-off in Boulder left little trace on the primary.