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Jon Stewart Lashes Out at Pollsters After Harris Defeat

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.

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.

 

 

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Comments


 
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 7
scooterjay | November 6, 2024 at 6:06 pm

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.


 
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healthguyfsu | November 6, 2024 at 6:10 pm

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.


     
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    Coolpapa in reply to healthguyfsu. | November 6, 2024 at 9:12 pm

    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.


 
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Petrushka | November 6, 2024 at 6:23 pm

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.


     
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    alaskabob in reply to Petrushka. | November 6, 2024 at 7:37 pm

    “”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.


     
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    Neo in reply to Petrushka. | November 6, 2024 at 8:04 pm

    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


 
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alaskabob | November 6, 2024 at 6:26 pm

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.


     
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    Hodge in reply to alaskabob. | November 6, 2024 at 7:34 pm

    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. .


 
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rhhardin | November 6, 2024 at 6:32 pm

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


 
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Ironclaw | November 6, 2024 at 6:38 pm

Ah the cries and lamentation. I love it I want more more more.


 
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StillNeedToDrainTheSwamp | November 6, 2024 at 6:40 pm

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.


     
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    clintack in reply to Tiki. | November 6, 2024 at 8:22 pm

    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.


 
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guyjones | November 6, 2024 at 6:58 pm

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.


     
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    henrybowman in reply to guyjones. | November 6, 2024 at 8:34 pm

    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.


       
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      guyjones in reply to henrybowman. | November 6, 2024 at 9:56 pm

      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


 
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Exiliado | November 6, 2024 at 7:18 pm

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”.


 
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Olinser | November 6, 2024 at 7:45 pm

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.


 
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Flatworm | November 6, 2024 at 8:35 pm

What Stewart fails to understand about the polling of the 2024 election cycle is that right-leaning pollsters were fairly accurate”

It’s easier to say “nobody really knows anything” than admit that the people he’s spent years vilifying know better.

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.

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