Jon Stewart: Skip the Takeaways and Get to Work

Anyone who has the misfortune of not being anesthetized this morning has likely logged on to the internet by now and seen it awash with theories from commentators far and wide — professional and amateur — about why Kamala Harris’s 2024 bid for president came up short and what lessons the Democratic Party can learn from this failure going forward. For his part, Jon Stewart, who was broadcasting live as the results came in during The Daily Show’s Election Night special, would like to remind us that all of these premature attempts at diagnosis are a fool’s errand. “Here’s what we know: We don’t really know anything,” he said. “We’re going to make all kinds of pronouncements about what this country is and what this world is, and the truth is we’re not really going to know shit.” Cut to: a classic Daily Show clip package, in which Stewart tees up a series of misguided postelection talking points levied by news pundits in years past to show how impossible it is to predict how future elections will shake out. After Hillary Clinton’s campaign loss in 2016, for example, a pair of talking heads suggested that the Democrats would aim to find a younger candidate in 2020. Instead, Stewart points out, they went with an even older candidate in 2020 with Joe Biden and it counterintuitively “turned out to be a winning message.”

So what does Stewart suggest we do instead of prognosticate and bloviate into the void? “Work like hell to move the world to the place that we prefer it to be.” Easier said than done, but point taken.