For a significant period of the time during the debate last night, it seemed that the moderators were not giving questions to Cruz. After a few initial questions to him, they went for a long period without asking him anything. As the top polling person present on the stage, one would have thought he would have had more questions and more time. In fact, it was Marco Rubio who was given more time. While Cruz came in with second most time, it was mostly front-loaded. There was a little bit of a dust up between Chris Wallace and Ted Cruz early on when Wallace refused to give Cruz the ability to respond to a point made against him by Rubio. The rules allowed for response by candidates who were named by other candidates, but Wallace didn’t adhere to that. After the dust up, the time given to Cruz seemed to dry up.

This attitude was reflected in the Fox News Twitter account as well. The last tweet with a Cruz response was reflected at 9:22 EST, 22 minutes into the 2 hour debate. From then until the end at there was not one Cruz response tweet. One reason was the long period the moderators went without asking him a question. Fox didn’t even put up Cruz’s closing statement while having the others, except for Christie.

In counting up the number of tweets from 9:22 to 11:14 on the Fox News account, there were 4 for Kasich (2 with video), 5 for Bush, 6 for Paul(3 with video), 8 for Carson, 8 for Christie (2 with video), and drum roll…16 for Rubio (3 with video). Zero for Cruz in almost an hour and forty minutes of the two hour debate.

Carson also suffered a time deficit given his standing in the polls, he was given the least amount of time of the candidates, at 6:11.

At the end of the debate, Fox had on Frank Luntz with a focus group, many of whom said they came away with a more positive view of Marco Rubio than they had had in the past. Well, if he was the one you were seeing and hearing, no doubt you would.