How Late Night Crowed Ahead of the Midterms

Midterm elections don’t always get the same amount of time on the late-night joke circuit as presidential elections, but this year, Democrats are polling well, which gave the Jimmys ample room to dunk on Trump. For Jimmy Fallon and Jimmy Kimmel, this was enough, while Seth Meyers and Jon Stewart, who often cover non-Trump political stories, focused on the other midterm narratives. But mostly they pilloried Michigan Democrat Haley Stevens, who broke from her party, retracted her endorsement of Abdul El-Sayed, and endorsed Republican Mike Rogers, seemingly because of her fiancé’s influence. That farcical catastrophe united the Democratic Party (a difficult feat — ask Snow White) and provided perfect fodder for jokes about something other than Trump’s reflecting pool. Below, find all the hosts’ best segments.

Late Night With Seth Meyers

“I have so much to say about this, but first: What the fuck’s with this camera angle?” Meyer said, looking at Stevens’s X video. “Normally, if you take a video in a car like this, it’s proof you’re driving drunk.” He then had a blast aligning Stevens with Trump, showing videos of the most racist things Trump has said about Al-Sayed (including butchering his name and saying he would want him to enter the Senate through a “metal detector”). He finally showed clips of Stevens’s disastrous CNN interview with Anderson Cooper before noting, “That interview is so brutal that I had to watch it through my fingers like a fuckin’ horror movie.” 

The Daily Show with Jon Stewart

On The Daily Show, Jon Stewart made a meal of showing Stevens’s hypocrisy. He began his segment with a supercut of everything Stevens had said about Mike Rogers aligning with Trump, like “The fight now is Abdul beating Rogers, because Rogers is a nightmare.” Then he showed her endorsement video and wondered, “Is her car in a ditch?… ‘Real quick before I lose consciousness, I am endorsing the nightmare.’” He focused on trying to determine Stevens’s reasoning, including a clip of her talking about how she wasn’t invited to El-Sayed’s campaign events and noting that El-Sayed does not support Israel while Stevens does. He was shocked, however, to learn that Stevens is not Jewish, but did note, “Throwing away all of your personal and professional relationships over a perceived personal slight? That’s pretty Jewish. We do do that.”

Jimmy Kimmel Live!

The Jimmys avoided the Stevens story entirely, instead opting to aim their jokes at a flailing President Trump. Kimmel mocked his enemy’s choice to give his final speech in front of the D.C.-based reflecting pool. “What better way to reassure the public that they are in good hands than in front of a pool you’ve repeatedly botched to the tune of $16 million?” he said. “Donald Trump, the man who famously promised to ‘drain the swamp,’ made his last stand at the site of his own man-made swamp, standing victoriously in front of this hard-won pond like the soldiers who triumphed at Iwo Jima.” 

The Tonight Show With Jimmy Fallon

Like Kimmel, Fallon was mostly interested in talking about Trump and doing his Trump impression. “Trump held campaign rallies in Kansas and Iowa after cancelling, then un-cancelling, them. He kicked off his speech like, ‘It’s great to be here, even though I tried not to be.’” He brought out another impression to take on the story of Trump claiming he’ll become “Mr. Veto” if Democrats take control of Congress. “Mr. Veto? Sounds like the guy he got to fix his reflecting pool: ‘Hey, how you doin’? We’re gonna put the Lincoln jacuzzi over there.’”