In his first The Daily Show monologue in the aftermath of Donald Trump’s presidential election win, Jon Stewart grappled with the question of why things went so poorly for Democrats. He showed a montage of clips of news pundits arguing that Democrats lost because they had gone “too woke.”
“I only have one problem with the ‘woke’ theory,” Stewart replied. “I just didn’t recall seeing any Democrats running on woke s–t.”
“These were the commercials I saw for the Democrats,” Stewart said, showing a montage of Democrat campaign ads expressing conservative stances on immigration.
“Those are the Democrats,” Stewart said. “They didn’t talk about pronouns. They didn’t say ‘Latinx.’ It was the opposite.”
Stewart later added, “They didn’t do the woke thing. They acted like Republicans for the last four months. They wore camo hats and went to Cheney family reunions. Do you know how dangerous it is to wear a hunting hat around the Cheneys?”
As for Stewart’s theory for why Democrats lost? He offered, “Democrats were mostly running against an identity that was defined for them based on a couple of months of post-George Floyd Defund the Police #MeToo Instagram posts from four years ago.”
Stewart continued, “The country felt like government wasn’t working for them, and the Democrats in particular were taking their hard-earned money and giving it to people who didn’t deserve it as much as them. And so the Democrats got shellacked.”
Stewart offered some hope for Democrats, however: “I just want to please assure people this isn’t forever. This is the map in 1984 when Ronald Reagan won.” He showed the electoral map, where Democrats lost every single state but Minnesota.
“Everyone thought, ‘that’s the end of the Democrats,’” Stewart said. “But eight years later there was a Democrat back in office. We don’t know what’s going to happen in four years at all.”
