Jon Stewart Lashes Out at Pollsters After Harris Defeat
What Stewart fails to understand about the polling of the 2024 election cycle is that right-leaning pollsters were fairly accurate.
It’s kind of hard to blame comedian Jon Stewart for taking out his frustration over Vice President Kamala Harris’s loss on the pollsters who had forecast either an outright win or at least a super-competitive race.
The week after Harris launched her campaign, Bloomberg-Morning Consult released a poll showing her ahead of former President Donald Trump in Michigan by a whopping 11 points. The overly optimistic poll was followed by others that found Harris drawing support from blacks, Hispanics, younger voters, and women, groups that Trump had been making inroads with prior to Biden’s withdrawal from the race. Democrats were feeling the “joy” of the Harris campaign.
Capping off the silly season, three days ahead of the election, came a stunning poll from Ann Selzer, once a highly reputable pollster with a long record of accuracy. Her survey showed Harris leading Trump by 3 points in Iowa, a red state, triggering shockwaves among Republicans and pumping up Democrats with false confidence.
By the time “The Daily Show” began recording at 11 p.m., Harris’s coming defeat was well known. And Stewart was mad – very, very mad. Below is an excerpt from his opening monologue:
Welcome back to the Daily Show. We don’t, it hasn’t been completely called yet. We don’t exactly know what all the results are going to be. Our time is running out. I do want to very quickly send a quick message to all the pollsters, the election pollsters. Blow me!
I don’t ever want to f***ing hear from you again, ever. I don’t ever want to hear, we’ve corrected the overcorrection. You don’t know sh** about sh**. And I don’t care for you.
…
Here’s the thing. Here’s what we know. Is that we don’t really know anything. And that we’re gonna come out of this election and we’re gonna make all kinds of pronouncements about what this country is and what this world is.
And the truth is, we’re not really gonna know sh**. And we’re gonna make it seem like this is the finality of our civilization and this thing. We’re all gonna have to wake up tomorrow morning and work like hell to move the world to the place that we prefer it to be.
And 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.
Jon Stewart Loses his mind on his late night show.
"To the pollsters I don't want o ever fu*king hear from you again"
"Blow me"#LiberalMeltdown #LiberalTears #liberalfreakout pic.twitter.com/4Nsz40alCG
— Phuzzylogic (@Phuzzyl0gic) November 6, 2024
Stewart told viewers that Republicans learn from their mistakes. For example, after Mitt Romney’s defeat in 2012, he said the GOP learned it must reach out to Hispanic voters. Next, he ran clips of Democrats arrogantly ignoring their own mistakes.
He concluded on a more hopeful note. He said, “My point is this. [Bleep.] But this isn’t the end. I promise you. This is not the end. And 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.”
🚨🇺🇸JON STEWART: ALL POLLSTERS CAN BLOW ME
"I don't wanna ever f**king hear from you again."https://t.co/NAuDUi7XRR
— Mario Nawfal (@MarioNawfal) November 6, 2024
What Stewart fails to understand about the polling of the 2024 election cycle is that right-leaning pollsters were fairly accurate. The final poll from Atlas Intel came extremely close to the actual results.
The biggest winner of the 2024 election:
Atlas Intel.
Spot on polling. pic.twitter.com/V68ZRDkAUn
— Han Shawnity 🇺🇸 (@HanShawnity) November 6, 2024
Harris supporters, including Stewart, simply chose to dismiss surveys from conservative pollsters, favoring instead those that told them what they wanted to hear. These were the same pollsters who had underestimated Trump’s strength in 2016 and 2020, and whom Nate Silver described last week as pressing their thumbs on the scale.
Although I do feel Stewart’s pain (not really), perhaps if he stepped out of his liberal echo chamber once in a while, he might stumble upon the truth.
Elizabeth writes commentary for The Washington Examiner. She is an academy fellow at The Heritage Foundation and a member of the Editorial Board at The Sixteenth Council, a London think tank. Please follow Elizabeth on X or LinkedIn.
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Comments
The best thing?
The cries of cheating and foreign meddling will be ignored.
You don’t need a weatherman to know which way the wind blows.
Good thing we prevented the vandals from taking the pump handles!
Now all we have to do is beware of democrat party’s axe handles.
Pollsters all fudge off of one another to try to account for the falibility of sampling error. There isn’t a truly definitive one among them IMO.
As the article’s author noted, there are some right-leaning pollsters who have been doing serious and accurate polling (Rich Baris, Mark Mitchell, the aforementioned Atlas Intel, and others). The problem is they are scoffed at and denigrated by establishment pollsters, especially by RCP. That makes the RCP Avg more a reflection of establishment groupthink than a measure of public opinion.
The real losers are the Media. They thought they had enough turd polishing cloths to ram Kamala toes into the White House.
What’s missing here is the 10-14 million votes that Biden got and Harris didn’t.
Democrats are blaming each other for not voting, but they ignore the possibility that those ten million voters didn’t vote last time, either.
“”He had no business running again,” said Charlie Comfort, an Iowa Democrat and Oskaloosa City councilman. “I blame him for giving us another four years of Trump because he chose to be selfish and egotistical. His legacy is severely tarnished in my book.” Ah,,,, when did YOU voice concern? Always someone else’s fault. But BIden and Ginsberg were allowed to stay on and covered for until they couldn’t hide the lies.
Total Votes
2004 — 121,069,054
2008 — 129,446,839
2012 — 126,849,299
2016 — 128,838,342
2020 — 155,507,476
2024 — 129,347,671
Nothing to see here, folks.
more like 26 million
The total is not yet final on 2024 but I agree that it doesn’t match up with all of the supposedly new registered voters from this year alone.
No one in the MSM will talk about the 26,000,000 missing votes.
Total mail in fraud. Hey Bill Barr can you see it now?
There’s another story within this story…..how did Trump win this year in a slaughter when he himself lost 2.5 million votes from the year before? Where did all of Trump’s votes go??? The explanation for the Dem missing votes seems to be widespread fraud. But Trump….how to explain????
2020 was a mail-in election for both parties. I’m assuming both parties did vote harvesting.
This is not illegal, or at least it wasn’t.
What’s suspicious is the lack of poll watching and safeguards.
The numbers will close as the count continues. California is only at 60% so millions of votes are yet to be counted but not enough to make up the large discrepancy. The other issue for Trump is roughly 2.5 million boomers die a year and they consistently majority voted Trump.
All except 2020 are votes. 2020 is votes plus ballots. The 25 million bump is like a DNA hit of the fraud.
Nobody has mentioned the major riots and firestorms raging in the Blue cities. what… none? But i thought… oh… never mind. However, I’d keep the boards around for the inauguration especially D.C. as the Dem children show up the screw up the Trump ceremonies. Harris wants Dem to continue to fight… ah.. like the truth and reality?
We were spared Harris meeting Putin where Putin would pull out a bottle of Russian salad dressing to go with her word salad.
I think it will take some time for them to get organized. They honestly believed (as in 2016) that no one would actually vote for a “convicted Fascist, etc, etc” and so they were caught by surprise by Harris loss.
Additionally, the usual suspects for spontaneous rioting are actually pleased that Trump won. They believe, I hope correctly, that Trump will make life better for the working classes. I know he’ll sure as hell try.
So, expect the “Intellectual Left” to organize a tremendous protest at the inauguration. They will use the next 90 days to get everyone signed up, assigned a bus, and issued preprinted signs. .
Organized? They needed the time to come back down and/or sober up.
Aha, Harry Litman breaks his silence and lays into Trump for the retribution he’s going to do next. Litman attraction: crazy eyes.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XGbn2O4Nwew
He talks as if what he’s predicting is bad, but never explains why. I wish Trump would do all that this guy predicts he will, but I fear that he won’t, just as he never went after Clinton last time.
Ah the cries and lamentation. I love it I want more more more.
More, more, more! How do you like it? How do you like it?
You also have to factor in all the “you are racist/homophobic/misogynistic” if you are a Trump supporter – so you are not going to out yourself to some pollster, ie many closet supporters that thus can be undercounted if this effect is not taken into account.
Stewart still thinks it’s all about packaging and messaging; he’s talking about repackaging the same old stinking corpse.
Wake up, the Uniparty died early this morning. Zombie Uniparty will shamble along for a few more years, but it’s over.
The uniparty is far, far from dead. We won a major victory yesterday, one that makes the rest of the fight possible, but it’s far from over. And it’s way too early to guess how the political realignment will shake out or even what the Trump administration will look like.
Things look far more hopeful than they did even two days ago, but the real fight is just beginning.
So tired of these arrogant, smug and sanctimonious Dhimmi-crat “comedian” pukes. Stewart, Colbert and their wretched ilk. They’re insufferably haughty, painfully unfunny and profoundly stupid.
We can at least enjoy four years of Trump & Vance ignoring these fools and refusing to pay them deference and obeisance.
Notice he named all the people who were at fault for being mistaken and pushing a bad narrative — except Jon Stewart.
My, he’s looking old, God bless him. Soon.
One of the most enjoyable aspects of a Trump-Vance Administration will be their giving a much-deserved middle finger to the leftist media shills/lapdogs/trained seals/stenographers. I’m thinking specifically of, most prominently, the utterly ridiculous exercise in mutual ego-stroking that is the White House Correspondents’ dinner. President Trump blowing this event off, as he did during his first term, will be grand.
With all of the climate change, not sure the west and east coast can handle all of the lib tears. The sea level is sure to rise in the coming weeks/months
I wonder if Obama is regretting his beachfront property…
Stewart is an idiot.
Those “pollsters” are nothing but propaganda pushers. It was his choice to listen to them.
He might learn a thing or two from reading “The Snake”.
Stewart doesn’t understand polling is an op meant to make people think the Dems didn’t cheat when they win and to make people think the Republicans must have cheated when they win. The latter also stokes the Dem base to become even more insane (abolish the EC, pack SCOTUS, etc.).
WHY DIDN’T THEY FORCE ME TO LISTEN TO THE PEOPLE ACTUALLY TELLING THE TRUTH THAT I CALLED NAZI RACIST EVIL MORONS.
Nate silver of 538 is the definition of fake news.
He is so overrated.
He used to be 538. 538 fired him.
I thought he was the one who called out all the fake pollsters. Am I mixing up names?
I don’t think Silver was wrong this cycle. He may have underestimated the Trump margin of victory but he said Trump was the favorite.
Silver may have been the last straw to start the coup against Biden. Without him screaming that Biden was going to wreck, the Ds may not have had the will to scrap him ahead of time.
Silver is a publicity hound.
It’s easier to say “nobody really knows anything” than admit that the people he’s spent years vilifying know better.
It’s also standard leftism to reject even the slightest notion that they themselves may be responsible for the problem. It’s never “our ideas/plans/candidates suck” even when they clearly do. Either incompetent execution of The Plan (see “not real communism”), idiot masses don’t know what’s good for them, or sabotage by Others (Kulaks, Jews, etc).
The Biden/Harris Campaign (same people same tactics) had a Billion dollars from uber doners to spread around and message with. If they are passing that much cash around and want polls that say they are doing great (to try and build momentum since everyone loves a winner) then the pollsters (who want her to win anyways) are going to take the money and keep pushing skewed polls. In the end the worse that happens is she loses and that cash source dries up until the midterms (because where else are the Democrats going to go to get their polls done?) but they are still there.
^^^ This ^^^
Step out of the bubble? Are you nuts??? It’s toxic out there, with all those bitter-clinging, deplorable, garbage Nazis running around loose, allowed to say things, allowed to {{{shudder}}} b>VOTE, even!
Gad, next you’ll be telling Jon and others like him that they need to listen to such people! What is wrong with you???????
2016 was worse, that’s why I stopped believing poll numbers.
Polls use to report a margin of error, and a couple of percent is not that bad. It just isn’t good enough to predict close elections.
What pundits (other than datarepublican) missed, was a 20 percent drop in early voting for democrats, and the lack of a corresponding drop in republican early voting.
All that was required for a trump victory was a normal turnout on Election Day. And this normal turnout was obvious in Florida by 10:00 am.
I’m a retired CPA. I follow the polls. I learned a long time ago that there is, besides the inherent margin of error, a +2 to +6 pro-Democrat sample bias error in the polls.
So I adjusted and I came up with:
Trump — 312
Harris — 226
There are still two states with a total of 17 electoral votes (AZ — 11, NV – 6) that Trump has won but have not been officially declared. That will take him to 312.
Regardless of polling, the result was due to a decline in early voting by democrats.
Why the decline?
One could speculate that the difference was poll watching and signature checking.
If so, perhaps we have returned to some semblance of normality.
What is he angry about? The phony polling helped his candidate.
This is what happens when weak personalities find their self-image challenged. They think they are the “good people” and can’t take it when they are shown to be gullible, self-aggrandizing fools more concerned with feeling superior to others than actually helping others. They are firm believers that “Its better to feel good than to do good.”
It’s not the pollsters that made Harris the most unqualified person ever to seek the presidency. Just saying, Mr. Stewart.
Even academics like Larry Sabato got it wrong, his crystal proclaimed the entire blue wall was going to hold, He also predicted Nevada to the dems, and Arizona to the repubs. We’ll have to wait and see if got those correct
Dear Jon, I can understand your frustration with the polls that were indicating a Kamala victory. However, you must realize by now that the vast majority of the Pollsters were also highly influenced by the extreme left and forgot to exercise due caution in their prediction. A person or institution blindly following an ideal is hardly unbiased, and obviously, in this instance, highly influenced by the mainstream media which is an extension of the Biden/Harris Administration. I suggest that in the future you rely more heavily to the voice of the “Independent” pollsters.