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.
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.”
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.
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.
CLICK HERE FOR FULL VERSION OF THIS STORY