Jon Stewart Tries to Reassure Voters on Election Night: ‘This Is Not the End’

Jon Stewart concluded his live coverage of the election by encouraging viewers to remain hopeful, even in the face of a potential Donald Trump presidency.

“We’re going to come out of this election and we’re going to make all kind of pronouncements about what this country is, and what this world is,” Stewart said when the show, The Daily Show Presents A Live Election Night Special With Jon Stewart: Indecision 2024: Nothing We Can Do About It Now, ended around midnight EST. “And the truth is, we’re not really going to know shit. We’re going to make it seem like this is the finality of our civilization.”

He continued, We’re all going to 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. And we have to remember that.”

As an example, he recounted various pronouncements made after the previous elections. These included footage of a news report saying that after Jan. 6 Trump would “never be allowed to step foot in the Capitol again.” Stewart responded, “My point is this: Fuck!”

He added, more hopefully, “This isn’t the end. I promise you, this is not the end. 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.”

During the special, Stewart slammed pollsters, who seem to have misjudged the race between Trump and Kamala Harris. “I do want to very quickly send a quick message to all the pollsters, the election pollsters: blow me,” Stewart said. “I don’t ever want to hear from you again. Ever. You don’t know shit about shit. I don’t want to hear, ‘We’ll figure it out next year, oh we were within the margin of—’ Blow me.”

Throughout the special, Stewart featured a few special guests, who were meant to (virtually) include Pennsylvania senator John Fetterman. Fetterman apparently canceled less than a minute before his segment.

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[Fetterman] was unable to join us,” Stewart told the live audience. “But because we are a professional and venerated news show it’s not like I just have to sit here… with nobody to talk to or nothing to do just because somebody said 30 seconds before we were supposed to have him as a guest.”

Fetterman was replaced by Arizona’s Democratic Governor Katie Hobbs, who confirmed, “It’ll probably be a long night, probably long several days as we are counting results of the votes.”