Jon Stewart closed his live Election night coverage late Tuesday by giving some reassurance to despondent The Daily Show viewers.
The host emphasized that the presidential election results were still coming in and nothing was yet decided. But given that vote tallies were suggesting a Donald Trump victory at the 12 a.m. hour, Stewart had some thoughts.
“This isn’t the end,” Stewart said during his Comedy Central special, The Daily Show Presents A Live Election Night Special With Jon Stewart: Indecision 2024: Nothing We Can Do About It Now (video below). “I promise you, this is not the end. We have to regroup, and we have to continue to fight and continue to work day in and day out to create a better society for our children, for this world, for this country, that we know is possible. It’s possible.”
“We’re going to come out of this election and we’re going to make all kind of pronouncements about what this country is, and what this world is,” he said. “And the truth is, we’re not really going to know shit. We’re going to make it seem like this is the finality of our civilization. We’re all going to have to wake up tomorrow morning and work like hell to move the world to the place that we prefer it to be.”
The host also slammed pollsters and pundits, first tearing into pollsters (as we did earlier) who once again might have misjudged the race, suggesting for weeks that things were much tighter between Kamala Harris and Donald Trump than the early election night results suggest.
“I do want to very quickly send a quick message to all the pollsters, the election pollsters: blow me,” Stewart said. “I don’t ever want to hear from you again. Ever. You don’t know shit about shit. I don’t want to hear, ‘We’ll figure it out next year, oh we were within the margin of—’ blow me.”
Then he laid into pundits who made incorrect assumptions coming out of previous presidential elections.
“I just want to point out, just as a matter of perspective, that the lessons that our pundits take away from these results that they will pronounce with certainty will be wrong,” he said, and played clips of pundits making predictions after previous election outcomes, such as the election of Barack Obama meaning that we were headed towards a post-racial America. “Yeah, that lasted a day,” he snarked.
In another clip, a pundit said the lesson of 2012 was that “the GOP needs to send a powerful signal to Hispanic voters that the party respects them,” and that was followed by a clip of Trump mocking Mexico.
During the one-hour telecast, Stewart tried to keep the mood up by showing election results of Democrats winning races, such as Harris winning New York and New Jersey. But early on, one signal things weren’t going so well was when Stewart revealed Pennsylvania Sen. John Fetterman canceled his planned appearance on the show at the last second.
“Look, I know a lot of people out there are feeling anxious,” Stewart said. “I just want to assure you that that is very good for our ratings, so keep up the good work out there.”
English (US) ·