Vice presidential debate moderator Elaine Quijano predictably displayed her left-wing bias Tuesday evening, peppering GOP candidate Mike Pence with eight times more tough questions than she did his Democratic counterpart Tim Kaine.
What's more, Quijano allowed Kaine to ride roughshod over the entire debate and interrupt his sparring partner over 70 -- yes 70 -- times. In fact, she even took part in the interruptions herself.
That sounds like a fail at "moderating" if you ask us.
The Media Research Center's Dan Gainor tallied Quijano's biased line of questioning and outlets like The Hill and FiveThirtyEight tallied over 70 instances in which Kaine rudely interrupted Pence during the debate.
"Hillary's right hand person" (Kaine's politically correct alternative to "man" and self-description last night), even interrupted when Pence was describing his experience during the 9/11 attacks! Most observers, even some dyed-in-the-wool liberals, found the display egregious.
On the moderator's biased line of question, Gainor writes:
By a factor of 8-to-1, Quijano peppered Pence with tough question after tough question. She reserved just one for Kaine. Even The New York Times admitted she took sides: “Elaine Quijano, the moderator, helped Mr. Kaine along, opening one question with a recitation of Mr. Trump’s statements.”
She also allowed the debate to spiral out of control when Tim Kaine compulsively interrupted his debate partner. The Hill reports that, "the Republican National Committee claimed Tim Kaine interrupted Mike Pence and the moderator over 70 times during Tuesday’s vice presidential debate." Well, it wasn't just the RNC. The surveying site FiveThirtyEight tallied various aspects of the debate, including the amount of interruptions, and agreed with the overall tally. The RNC's email also noted that:
“Undecided voter in Ohio says, 'Kaine came off like a jerk' tonight. Adds that he 'reinforced' some of the negatives about Clinton," read one tweet from CNN’s Dan Merica.
Watch for yourself and decide:
The Hill adds:
And outside analysis confirms that Kaine did push harder to interject. Analysis from FiveThirtyEight found that Kaine interrupted over 70 times, compared to just over 40 interruptions for Pence.
The Hill's statement is misleading, however, because FiveThirtyEight actually categorizes Pence as engaging in "fleeting interjections" as opposed to Kaine's clear crossing over into full-fledged interruption territory:
As TruthRevolt noted earlier, even MSNBC's Chris Matthews gave the debate win to the "eloquent" Mike Pence over the "desperate" Tim Kaine. The Washington Post's Chris Cillizza, too, gave the debate win to Mike Pence, saying the entire evening may have turned off people from vice presidential debates forever.
