On the eve of election day, late-night hosts talked polls, the exhaustion of an endless campaign cycle and their closing arguments for Kamala Harris.
Jimmy Kimmel
“We are now one day away from having to wait another week to find out who won the election,” said Jimmy Kimmel on Monday evening. “It feels like the whole country is waiting to get the results of a biopsy.”
Donald Trump declared his candidacy nearly two years ago, on 15 November 2022. “And now, 720 days, 88 criminal charges, 34 felony convictions, four indictments, two Democratic opponents and one garbage truck later, here we are. Election day,” said Kimmel.
According to most national polls, the race is a dead heat, but Kimmel had harsh words for the pollsters. “These polls? They’re mood rings. That’s all they are,” he said. “They bring you up, they bring you down. Poll is short for bipolar.
“There’s no magic involved, it’s heads or tails,” he added. “At the end of this, the pollsters who were wrong will quietly disappear. The other ones will be like ‘I told you, 1%.’ What did you tell us? You called 800 losers who didn’t have enough sense to not answer an unknown call.
“I still don’t understand how this race is close,” he continued, referencing recordings obtained by the Daily Beast of Jeffrey Epstein talking about Trump as his “friend”.
“Epstein said Trump told him he likes to have sex with the wives of his best friends, to the point where Epstein described Trump as having no ‘moral compass’. Do you know what kind of lowlife you have to be for Jeffrey Epstein to say you have no moral compass?” he fumed. “It’s like if R Kelly got mad at you for leaving the toilet seat up.”
Kimmel concluded with his final message regarding the election: “Take a moment to imagine a world in which you wake up in the morning, you check the news, and no one says the words ‘Donald’ or ‘Trump’. Just a bunch of normal, boring stuff. Wouldn’t that be nice? No lawn signs. No red hats. No arguing with your grandfather.
“Let’s remove this cancerous polyp from our collective national colon,” he added, “and move on already.”
Seth Meyers
“None of us can control what happens tomorrow, we can only control how drunk we are when it happens,” said Seth Meyers on Late Night, staring down a batch of polls declaring the election a “toss-up”.
“How can so many polls be tied?” he wondered. “Are they doing the first half of the poll at an artisanal coffee shop in Williamsburg and the second half of the poll in a beer line at a Kid Rock concert?
“How is it possible that exactly half the country think Trump is an amoral psychopath who would wreck American democracy, and the other half thinks he’s an amoral psychopath who would wreck American democracy … but it’s worth it because he’s an incredible dancer!”
Meyers devoted a good chunk of his monologue to reminding voters what they were choosing between. Republicans’ closing message, he argued, was: “Are you going to vote for a woman whose laugh they don’t like, or are you going to vote for a guy who fomented a violent coup attempt after a months-long campaign against the 2020 election, undercut the nation’s response to a deadly pandemic that spiraled out of control because he tried to cover it up, lied about its severity, promoted sham treatments for it, said we could cure it by injecting disinfectant and shining powerful lights inside the body, became the first president since Herbert Hoover to oversee a net job loss?”
He listed more disqualifying credentials up to and including January 6 – full transcript here – and concluded with a note of exhaustion. “I’ve been talking about this man for nearly a decade now, as evidenced by the fact that everything I just listed is in my brain still somehow,” he said. “The symptoms that gave rise to him will not immediately go away if he loses tomorrow, but we do have an opportunity to say as a nation that we want him to go away. And I really hope that happens, mainly so I never have to think about this ever again.”
Stephen Colbert
“After a two-year campaign, we have finally made it through all 20 years,” said Stephen Colbert on Late Night. “We’re all in some true sense about to witness history. Good or bad. I’m guessing this is how the people of Pompeii felt when Vesuvius was trying to get re-elected.”
Like Meyers and Kimmel, Colbert was frustrated by the dead-heat polls. “I could get a clearer prediction from a magic 8 ball!” he joked.
One ray of light, however, was J Ann Selzer’s highly regarded Des Moines Register poll in Iowa, which found Harris leading Trump by three points, with senior women breaking for the vice-president 63% to 28%. “Oh, senior women are AAR-pissed,” Colbert quipped. “Save me, Gam-Gam!”
The Harris campaign cautioned about getting too excited, but “too late!” Colbert chirped. “I have to be excited, because I’ve only got two other choices. Absolute terror or Absolut vodka. I need this. There’s no in between.”
Meanwhile, in the final days of the campaign, Trump was “presenting a very good case that his brain done broke”, Colbert quipped. In North Carolina, Trump tried to “out-Tim Walz Tim Walz” with a football pep talk that went awry. “All we have to do is carry that ball over that … thing,” he said.
“Oh yes, exactly,” Colbert joked. “Just carry the ball over that … thing.”
