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Jimmy Kimmel has exposed how little Americans actually know about their Presidential elections in a series of bizarre interviews.
The US talk show host was left tearful after it was declared that Donald Trump was victorious over Kamala Harris and won the 2024 US election.
After gaining a conclusive lead overnight, Trump passed the threshold of 270 electoral votes in the very early hours of the morning in America.
But several hours later, and it seems a lot of Americans had no idea what was going.
For his late night programme on Wednesday, Kimmel shared a clip where his team interviewed a series of unsuspecting average people about their plans for voting – a whole day after votes closed.
He explained: ‘We went out on the street today, and we asked people if they voted today and of course the election was yesterday but did our fellow Americans know that? Well, let’s find out.’
The interviews that followed revealed plenty of people had no idea about the historic moment that had happened, and still thought they had a chance to vote for Harris.
One person was asked, on the day after voting, if they were planning on voting today, to which they quickly replied: ‘Yes.’
When asked if they knew where their polling station was, they said: ‘It’s… by my house,’ and claimed there were ‘big lines’ at the polling station today.
‘You need to make sure you stay [in line] and vote, even if that line is a little long, you’ve just got to stay in that line,’ they said.
They then said they think Joe Biden ‘has a chance’ – clearly oblivious to the fact that the former President wasn’t even running.
And it’s not just politics they were clueless on.
When asked if they were planning on changing their clocks back next weekend, they answered ‘yes’, even though clocks had already gone back the weekend before…
Another interviewee said they were ‘excited but very nervous as well’, and didn’t have any predictions (despite the results having been announced).
‘I’ve been watching the news and it’s hard to say what’s going to happen.’
They then claimed they were a ‘news junkie’ who reads a lot ‘on the internet’, watches NBC and a ‘little bit of Fox’.
Somehow though, they’d managed to miss what was all over the internet, NBC and Fox, for the past day.
A third person stopped on the street said they were voting for Harris ‘today’, with the interviewer sarcastically replying: ‘Great, she could use that vote.’
When asked if Harris could ‘get it done’, they replied: ‘I hope so, I believe in you, we believe in you, you can do it, you’ve got this.’
One person was completely honest about their voting intentions… and their conspiracy theories.
They bluntly replied that they weren’t voting, explaining: ‘I don’t believe in voting, I don’t really think our vote matters, I think it’s the higher ups at Wall Street that pick whatever is happening, period.’
Another, with the interviews being recorded after the voting results, claimed she’d be watching at home with her boyfriend when the votes came out.
She then went on to throw her boyfriend under the bus, saying he would be voting today, hours after the polling stations closed.
‘Good luck with the election, I really hope you win,’ she then told Harris, through the camera.
One person said they’d be ‘voting by mail’, and when asked who they were supporting, gave a confused look and said: ‘Who’s running for President?’
Well, at least they didn’t pretend to know…
The clip came after Kimmel struggled to hold back his tears during the opening monologue to his US talk show, describing Trump’s victory as a ‘terrible night’.
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He led US late-night chat show hosts offering their reaction after Trump defeated Harris in the 2024 election, with Stephen Colbert noting the ‘deep shock and sense of loss is enormous’ and Seth Meyers calling Trump a ‘bad person’.
Kimmel, 56, kicked off his monologue noting that the choice for US president came down to a prosecutor and a criminal, ‘and we chose the criminal’.
‘More than half of this country voted for the criminal who is planning to pardon himself for his crimes. I guess this election wasn’t rigged,’ he joked.
Becoming emotional, Kimmel continued: ‘It was a terrible night for women, for children, for the hundreds of thousands of hard-working immigrants who make this country go, for health care, for our climate, for science, for journalism, for justice, for free speech.
‘It was a terrible night for poor people, for the middle class, for seniors who rely on social security, for our allies in Ukraine, for NATO, for the truth, and democracy and decency.
‘And it was a terrible night for everyone who voted against him. And guess what? It was a bad night for everyone who voted for him too, you just don’t realise it yet.’
Kimmel described it as a ‘really good night’ for Russian leader Vladimir Putin, and ‘lovable billionaires like Elon Musk’ as well as ‘all the wriggling brain worms who sold what was left of their souls to bow down to Donald Trump’.
‘I’m going to say something that Trump would never say unless it favoured him, the people voted and this is the choice we made,’ Kimmel went on.
‘That’s that, he won, doesn’t mean we give up but it also doesn’t mean we storm the Capitol because we don’t like the result.
‘And, I’ve been trying to come up with something positive, the best thing I can come up with is, we’ve been through this once before and yes this time it probably is going to be worse, maybe a lot worse but I also think that maybe we will look back and realise that in the long run this is what we needed to wake us up.
‘Maybe the people who care so much about him need to find out how little he cares about them.’
‘The bar’s low, he has an opportunity to win us over,’ Kimmel added, saying to cheers: ‘Or maybe the good part about this is that he can’t run again in 2028.
‘Maybe next time the Republicans will nominate an orangutan for President.’
He joked his only request to Trump is that he ‘share a prison cell with Taylor Swift’ after they both endorsed Harris for president.
Meanwhile, The Late Show With Stephen Colbert host began his opening monologue with a statement: ‘Well f***, it happened again.’
Colbert continued: ‘After a bizarre and vicious campaign fuelled by a desperate need not to go to jail, Donald Trump has won the 2024 election.
‘The deep shock and sense of loss is enormous.’
Similarly, The Late Night With Seth Meyers presenter also kicked off his show reflecting on the election, admitting he voted for Democratic nominee Harris.
‘I don’t think Donald Trump’s a good person, I’d even go so far as to say he’s a bad person,’ Meyers said.
‘Now, in my defence, I’m only basing that on everything I’ve ever been taught about what makes someone good or bad. That’s it.
‘And this is real and this is something I accept, half the country thinks he’s a good person or they don’t care that he’s not because they think he’s a good president and because of that, he’s going to be our president again.
‘That’s how democracy works in America. A country that is a privilege to live in.’
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