But for one rather superficial problem—he’s a little too short—Jon Stewart strikes me as almost the ideal Blue candidate for president in 2028.
And, yes, I know that’s ridiculous. Height shouldn’t matter. But presidential politics is ridiculous, and American voters have a long history of responding to candidates as visual symbols as much as collections of policies. Presidents are supposed to look presidential, whatever that means at any particular moment in American history. Stewart doesn’t quite fit the traditional physical template.
Other than that, though? He has an awful lot going for him.
The obvious thing is that Stewart knows how to communicate. Watch him on The Daily Show and you can see that he understands an audience instinctively. He knows when to joke, when to become indignant, when to slow down and make an argument and, perhaps most importantly, when to let the audience understand that he thinks something is genuinely important. That’s an enormously valuable political skill. Politics is not simply a matter of having the right policies. It’s the ability to explain those policies—and the values behind them—to millions of people who aren’t particularly interested in sitting down with a 40-page position paper.
Stewart can do that.
He also has something that separates him from the usual celebrity candidate: a demonstrated record of engaging seriously with public policy when he decides an issue matters. His advocacy on behalf of 9/11 first responders is the most obvious example. He didn’t simply perform a monologue about it and move on to the next night’s jokes. He repeatedly used his celebrity, his platform and his ability to embarrass politicians into paying attention to people who had become victims of congressional inertia.
That matters to me because it suggests that underneath the comedian persona is someone who understands that politics ultimately involves doing things. Stewart can be funny about government dysfunction, but he has also demonstrated a willingness to step outside the studio and actually fight that dysfunction.
And there is precedent for the general phenomenon of a comedian or entertainer making the jump into national politics. The most dramatic contemporary example is Volodymyr Zelenskyy, who went from being a comedic actor—famously playing the president of Ukraine on television—to actually becoming president of Ukraine.
Obviously, the United States in 2028 would not be Ukraine in 2019. The political systems are different, the circumstances are different and the men themselves are different. I’m not suggesting that because Zelenskyy successfully made that transition, Stewart necessarily could.
The comparison simply demonstrates that the idea isn’t inherently absurd.
In fact, Stewart might have some advantages that conventional politicians increasingly lack. He has spent decades thinking about politics in public. He has interviewed presidents, senators, cabinet officials, journalists, activists and policy experts. He understands how Washington talks about itself, and he also understands how absurd that language often sounds to people outside Washington. He has spent much of his career acting as a translator between the political establishment and an audience that suspects the political establishment is full of crap.
That could be an extraordinarily useful skill for a presidential candidate.
There’s another advantage that shouldn’t be underestimated: Stewart already has a public persona.
One of the strange problems with presidential campaigns is that candidates spend enormous amounts of time trying to manufacture authenticity. Consultants put them in diners. They roll up their sleeves. They eat local food while cameras record them eating local food. Every gesture becomes part of an elaborate performance designed to convince voters that the candidate is a normal human being.
Stewart wouldn’t have to introduce himself to America. Millions of people already have a reasonably strong sense of who they think he is. Whether that perception is entirely accurate is almost beside the point. Presidential politics operates partly through these parasocial relationships. Voters decide they trust someone—or don’t—long before they’ve read the person’s tax proposal.
And Stewart’s political style happens to fit the moment remarkably well. He can be populist without sounding like he’s delivering a canned populist speech. He can attack institutions while still seeming to believe that institutions ought to function. He can express outrage without making outrage his entire personality. Most importantly, he can communicate frustration with the system while still sounding as though he fundamentally believes democratic government is worth saving.
That’s a difficult combination.
There is, however, one gigantic problem with the whole idea.
I don’t think Blues would nominate him.
The trauma of Donald Trump’s rise would loom over the entire campaign. Trump established the terrifying possibility that celebrity could substitute for governing experience, and I suspect a substantial portion of the Democratic electorate would look at Stewart and immediately think: We are not doing this.
They would see another television personality running for the presidency without having previously been a governor, senator, cabinet secretary or vice president. They would worry that charisma was once again being mistaken for competence. They would worry that knowing how to destroy somebody in an eight-minute television segment isn’t remotely the same thing as managing the federal bureaucracy, negotiating with Congress, choosing military options during an international crisis or making decisions with incomplete intelligence at three in the morning.
And those would be perfectly reasonable concerns.
In fact, that’s the paradox that makes a hypothetical Stewart candidacy so interesting. The very thing that would make him such a formidable candidate—his status as a charismatic political outsider with enormous communication skills—is also the thing that would frighten Democratic voters the most.
After Trump, Blues are understandably suspicious of the argument that someone should be president because they’re really good on television.
Stewart’s defenders could respond that the comparison is unfair. Stewart has spent decades demonstrating intellectual curiosity about government and public policy. His work on behalf of first responders suggests that he understands the difference between commenting on politics and actually pushing politicians to act. And nothing about his public career suggests that he regards government merely as another stage for himself.
But that still leaves the leap.
President of the United States is an insane first elected job.
I suspect Democratic primary voters would ultimately decide that the risk was simply too great. Give them a governor with executive experience, or a senator who has survived difficult campaigns, or somebody who has already spent years operating inside the machinery of government, and they would probably choose that person over Stewart—even if Stewart were obviously the more gifted communicator.
Which is a shame, because communication may be precisely what Blues need.
Politics has become increasingly theatrical, fragmented and personality-driven. The candidate who can explain something simply, make people laugh and then pivot without warning into genuine moral seriousness possesses an unusual political weapon. Stewart has been practicing that trick for decades.
I don’t know whether Jon Stewart would actually make a good president. Nobody could know that in advance.
I’m not even convinced Jon Stewart wants to be president.
But if you designed a candidate specifically for the political-media environment of 2028—funny, angry without seeming deranged, famous without seeming completely manufactured, politically literate, comfortable improvising, able to dismantle an opponent’s argument in real time and possessing at least some record of converting advocacy into political action—you might end up with someone who looked remarkably like Jon Stewart.
Just maybe six inches taller.
