Liberal comedian Jon Stewart probably didn’t help get President Trump elected.
Researchers have retracted a study that claimed Jon Stewart’s departure from “The Daily Show” may have swung the 2016 presidential election.
Political scientists Ethan Porter and Tom Wood published their paper in late April with the conclusion that Stewart’s departure from the show led to a 1% increase in Trump’s vote share.
“Our results make clear that late-night political comedy can have meaningful effects on presidential elections,” the pair wrote.
The theory went that because Stewart’s departure led to a dip in “The Daily Show” ratings, that in turn meant fewer voters had a negative perception of Donald Trump, whom the show frequently mocked.
But on May 10, Wood announced they’d made a mistake around the ratings of “The Daily Show” that led them to overestimate the impact of Stewart’s departure.
“Upon closer investigation … we discovered we had made a computational error in aggregating years of ratings data,” and that the pair had totaled some of their data when they meant to average it out, wrote Wood on Twitter. “After fixing this error, the corrected regression results do not implicate changes in the Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert audiences as important correlates of Donald Trump’s 2016 presidential vote.”
Wood said he and Porter contacted the editors at the academic journal where their study was published to retract it and “are deeply sorry for the error.”
