Despite Stephen Colbert and Trevor Noah reacting to last night’s election results live, the best late-night clip that circulated online throughout Tuesday evening was one from The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon that’s nearly two weeks old. Former presidential candidate Bernie Sanders appeared on Fallon’s show on October 23, and in the clip, Fallon asked Sanders when he thought the election results would be finalized. Sanders said he was worried about exactly what ended up playing out last night: states like Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Wisconsin having huge numbers of mail-in ballots that are not yet counted. He explained to Fallon:
“Here is my worry: What polls show, and what studies have shown, is that, for whatever reason, Democrats are more likely to use mail-in ballots. Republicans are more likely to walk into polling booths on Election Day. It is likely that the first votes that will be counted will be those people who came in on Election Day, which will be Republican. And here is the fear, and I hope everybody hears it: I don’t know what’s going to happen; nobody does. But it could well be that at 10:00 on Election Night, Trump is winning in Michigan, he’s winning in Pennsylvania, he’s winning in Wisconsin, and he gets on the television and he says, ‘Thank you, Americans, for electing me! It’s all over, have a good day!’ But then the next day and the day following, all of those mail-in ballots start getting counted, and it turns out that Biden has won those states, at which point Trump says, ‘See? I told you the whole thing was fraudulent! I told you all those mail-in ballots were crooked, and we’re not gonna leave office!’ So that is a worry that I and a lot of people have.”
Of course, it’s currently the day after the election; Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Wisconsin still haven’t been called; and Donald Trump gave an overnight speech in which he falsely claimed he had won Michigan and made so many inaccurate claims that NBC’s Savannah Guthrie cut into his speech to point out that Trump was saying things “that are just frankly not true.” Time will tell whether the rest of Sanders’s prediction plays out, but so far, he’s nailed it.
