Hillary Clinton’s defenders will never stop making excuses for why she lost in 2016: It was Matt Lauer! It was James Comey! It was men being sexist! It was women being sexist! It was voter suppression! It was Citizens United! It was fake news! It was WikiLeaks! It was Facebook! It was the Russians!
Today, a new excuse: It was Jon Stewart!
In the middle of last week, Huma Abedin must have bustled over to Hillary’s place with a lovingly bound copy of the latest in cutting-edge academic research, a report that says Jon Stewart’s retirement is ACKSHULLY the reason Donald Trump won. We’ll all be able to hear more about this in Frau Pantsuit’s next memoir, “7,573 Other Reasons I Lost That Totally Were Not My Fault, You Ungrateful Pissants.”
The latest in cutting-edge political science/flat-earth theory is that after Stewart quit hosting a comedy show for liberals, the advantage swung to Trump because Democrats forgot there was an election or something.
Proving that the nation’s professoriate is even more obtuse than you would have suspected, Ethan Porter of George Washington University and Thomas J. Wood of Ohio State University note that when Stewart departed “The Daily Show,” ratings sank. “The transition at ‘The Daily Show’ spurred a 1.1% increase in Trump’s county-level vote share,” they claim in their paper, “Did Jon Stewart Elect Donald Trump? Evidence From Television Ratings Data” published in the journal Electoral Studies.
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