I’ll give you guys some news. All over the internet last night was a video that went viral. Somebody in the balcony filmed Chris Christie coming over to yours truly during a commercial break at the end of the first hour of the debate and kind of getting up in my grill. There was all sorts of speculation about what was happening.
I will tell you what was happening. It was not off the record. He was pissed off. He was mad that he wasn’t getting enough questions. He said, you know, ‘I made it up on this stage and I haven’t been able to speak in a while. I should have been brought in on that last debate.’ I had a couple of minds of it. I told him, ‘We’re coming to you. You’re gonna be happy in the second hour.’ I lived up to that.
He was right that in the last run he had been excluded. The reason that happened was because we let them fight it out in the first 40 minutes of the debate and that comes at the expense of something. Where you insert yourself, Chris Christie or anyone else, on these earlier fights is at the expense of something else that’s coming. That’s fine. We were not wedded to our rundown. We had like 40 questions going out there, and our goal was to ask 10 of them in a perfect world.
The producers in the truck have to constantly rejigger the rundown based one what happens. Our whole block about Donald Trump, for example, was supposed to play much earlier in the night. We had to move it because the debates that took place and the timing of the show. The long and short of it is: The even distribution of questions got mucked up by all the arguing.
Having said that, I knew very well that Christie was going to get asked a Trump question having to do with immigration at the top of the next hour, so it would be fair to him. He’s polling at 2 percent nationally. In no debate ever – and I’ve done six of them – have we given as many questions to the guy who’s at 3 percent as to the person who’s in the lead, at least amongst the candidates on the stage. I’m sorry, Gov. Christie. That’s the way it is.
When all was said and done, CNN reported that Vivek Ramaswamy got 22 minutes, Gov. DeSantis got 21 minutes, Nikki Haley 17 minutes, and Christie 16 minutes and 52 seconds. He was a half a minute behind Haley who is tied up there at number one. So, I don’t want to hear it, frankly.
We did right by him. He got a ton of airtime. That’s what he was mad about. I like the guy, but they never like it when they don’t get to speak.
You can check out Megyn’s full analysis by tuning in to episode 681 on YouTube, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you like to listen. And don’t forget that you can catch The Megyn Kelly Show live on SiriusXM’s Triumph (channel 111) weekdays from 12pm to 2pm ET.