Jon Stewart warmed up with a few bars of “Les Misérables,” then made clear he was not pretending to be neutral about President Donald Trump.
The “Daily Show” host returned to his desk Monday, Nov. 2, 2026, the night before the election, and built his monologue around the news media’s reliance on midterm polling rather than the president’s closing argument.
Stewart played clips from MS NOW and CNN emphasizing polls that favored Democrats, followed by a clip of CNN’s John Berman asking, “What if the polls are wrong?” Stewart answered the screen directly: “Are you [expletive] kidding me right now? The big polls, whoo, whoo! You can’t say, ‘whoo,’ and then, ‘buh.’ It’s whoo, it’s not buh. It’s not both.”
He kept going. “No matter how hard you try, you cannot keep our news media off the poll. And I know they might say, ‘Oh, we’re working our way through the Electoral College.’ No! Being on the poll is a choice,” Stewart said, adding: “They know that that is what our little reptilian brains are craving. Immigration, tariffs, Iran – we don’t care. What’s the score?”
Why He Leaped Over the Desk
Stewart saved his sharpest criticism for CNN chief data analyst Harry Enten, faulting him for trying to “make polling fun.” The clips he rolled showed Enten with props including a wet floor caution sign, a giant die and a foam finger. Stewart jumped over the desk during the bit: “It’s not fun. It’s not fun. It’s not cute.”
Author Michael Lewis sat for the Nov. 2 interview. The show’s News Team took over for the rest of election week — Ronny Chieng on Tuesday, Nov. 3, with guest Min Jin Lee, Michael Kosta on Wednesday, Nov. 4, with guest Erica Chenoweth, and Jordan Klepper on Thursday, Nov. 5, with guest Grandmaster Flash.
From Show Tune to Voting Plea
Stewart recorded his final pre-midterms plea for his podcast, “The Weekly Show,” and shared a clip of it on social media Tuesday, Oct. 27, a week before the Nov. 3 elections. He urged listeners to vote against Trump’s Republican candidates. The full episode aired Wednesday, Oct. 28, and opened with a snippet of “Do You Hear the People Sing?” from “Les Misérables” before the serious turn.
“It’s the election,” Stewart said in the podcast plea. “This is the last time that we will speak before the election, and I just want to urge everybody out there to please, please — for the love of God — get out there and vote and express your political opinion.”
He refused the usual bipartisan framing. “I’d like to frame it as, ‘However you’ll vote,’ but I don’t mean that,” he said. “I mean it as, ‘Please send a message to this reckless ****show of an administration that enough is enough, that we have had it, that it is time for someone to step up and provide, I believe the framers referred to them as checks and balances, on this utterly imperious administration.’” The rest of the episode left the campaign behind for a financial apocalypse built around artificial intelligence.
Yogi Bear and the Windowsill Pie
The day before that clip went out, Stewart devoted his Monday, Oct. 26, monologue to the president’s closing argument. He opened with a Fox News reporter cutting away from a young Trump rallygoer whose top concerns were inflation and the instability of the Iran war. Trump’s own chosen subjects, by the monologue’s accounting, were oil company profits, veterans, a Muslim candidate and a campaign ad in Ohio.
At his Oct. 25 rally in Port Huron, Mich., Trump praised rapper Nicki Minaj’s “beautiful” backside while explaining that his earlier comments about Ohio Sen. Jon Husted’s rear end were meant in fun and taken out of context by the news media. Minaj, a Trump supporter, had flown to the rally with the president on Air Force One. Stewart put up a photo of Trump standing behind her as she spoke: “He’s like Yogi Bear floating towards a pie on a windowsill.”
The monologue also covered Trump’s attacks on Abdul El-Sayed, the surging progressive Democratic Senate candidate in Michigan, and the ad from Republican Vivek Ramaswamy’s gubernatorial campaign featuring the estranged mother of Democratic candidate Amy Acton calling her daughter a liar. Acton has not spoken to her mother in 50 years. Trump defended the ad and attacked NBC reporter Monica Alba for asking about it.
Stewart also played a clip of Trump threatening that Camp Lejeune veterans with cancer caused by contaminated drinking water would not receive the settlement money legally awarded to them if Republicans lost. That, in Stewart’s telling, was the closing pitch voters would answer on Nov. 3.
Voters answered by handing Democrats control of both the House and the Senate. El-Sayed won the Michigan Senate race, and Husted lost his Ohio seat to Democrat Sherrod Brown.
Flipping Congress Is the Easy Part
Stewart’s message to his own side has been less flattering than his message about Trump. On an earlier “Weekly Show” episode, he warned that flipping Congress would be the easy part and that Democrats would then have to act on the cost of living. Of minority leaders Sen. Chuck Schumer and Rep. Hakeem Jeffries, both New York Democrats, he said: “They’re going to have to deliver.” Opposition to Trump, he argued, cannot be the party’s entire personality; they need a prescription for rebalancing the economy.
He also pushed back on impeachment talk, saying he has no appetite for a five-act performative run of House hearings letting everyone pantomime accountability. Investigations are fine, Stewart said, but they belong in the waiting room behind problems killing people right now. His bet is that Trump would simply outlast them anyway. What he wants instead is a full government effort at rebalancing labor against capital.
