In this tight contest, presidential debate moderators are fair game
WASHINGTON: As Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton tried to convince voters as to who is the better candidate in the first of their three face-offs, Lester Holt, the moderator, would have quietly wished he did not do too bad himself. Moderators are in play this election cycle more than ever before in recent years.
Trump has already told moderators not to fact-check him like CNN’s Candy Crowley did with Mitt Romney, the Republican candidate who sought to unseat President Ba rack O ba main 2012. She was viciously slammed as unfair by Republicans.
Trump, onceagain, wentonto call moderators “unfair”, arguing they are mostly Democrats. “By the way, Lester is a Democrat. It’s aphony system,” hesaid recently. In fact, Holt is a registered Republican.
But Trump, who has only a nod ding acquaintance with facts ornoneatall, has also said CNN’s Andersen Cooper, who moderatesthe seconddebate with ABC News’s Martha Raddatz, has treated him“unfair ly” onhisnetwork, which the Republican calls the “Clinton News Network”.
The Commission on Presidential Debates, anon-partisan and non-profit privately funded organisation, announced the moderator sin early September after checking with, and with the concurrence of, the two campaigns as is the tradition.
Fox’s Megan Kelly, who has had a running battle with Trump, was dropped because the nominee’ s campaign didn’ t expect her to be fair. And the Clinton campaign pushed back on anyone and everyone from the right-leaning Fox. They may have agreed eventually to Fox’s Chris Wallace, however, because he is a registered Democrat, something he has attributed to staying in Democratic- dominated Washington. He is scheduled to moderate the last debate.
All of this, and other more intrusive details of the moderators may be on the table in a race as tight as this — Clinton and Trump are separated only by 2.1 points in the Real Clear Politics average of polls, in favour of the Democrat. And Five Thirty Eight, which predicts outcome using a complex formula based on weighted aggregation of polls, predicts a Clinton win by a slim margin of 3.6 points at 51.8% to Trump’s 48.2%.
The debates will matter, and a lot. And moderators will be fair game. They will be targeted not only by the Trump campaign, which may have been seen as the pushier and whinier of the two. The Clinton campaign was outraged with TV hostMattLauer’s failure to fact-check Trump on Iraq during back-to-back townhall style interviews.