Republicans claim Mike Pence as “clear winner” of US Vice-Presidential debate… before it happened

Facepalm.

The 2016 US Presidential election has consistently delivered moments of incompetence from all parties and it threw up another dinger on Tuesday night. In what was the first and only Vice-Presidential debate of 2016, the running mates for Donald Trump and Hilary Clinton, Mike Pence and Tim Kaine, went head to head in a 90-minute debate in Virginia. Many accounts suggest that Pence acquitted himself quite well – despite, according to the New York Times, “scarcely defending him (Donald Trump) at all” – but his performance was undermined by a rather glaring administration error that was picked up hours before the debate even started. On their website, the Republican National Committee, claimed, as you might expect them to do, that Pence was the “clear winner” of the debate. Problem is, they made those claims well before the debate even started and although the piece was subsequently removed from the website, screenshots were taken and circulated all over the Internet. We’re assuming the following tweet, posted after the debate, was an attempt to save face, but the damage had already been done at that stage. https://twitter.com/GOP/status/783496987463352328