In November 2020, with votes still being counted three days after the presidential election, Jimmy Kimmel needed someone to help make sense of what was happening.
So he turned to George Stephanopoulos.
The ABC News anchor joined Jimmy Kimmel Live! on Friday, Nov. 6, one day before the race was called for Joe Biden. His booking fit what had, by then, become a familiar late-night formula: when politics got confusing, bring out the newsman.
Four years later, Kimmel faced another post-election show, but this time he turned to a very different kind of explainer.
On Nov. 6, 2024, Kimmel’s guests were Jon Favreau, Jon Lovett, Tommy Vietor, and Dan Pfeiffer of the popular political podcast Pod Save America. Like Stephanopoulos four years earlier, they were there to help make sense of what had happened. Unlike Stephanopoulos, they had spent the campaign trying to prevent it.
Tonight, Favreau, Lovett, Vietor, and Pfeiffer will be back for Kimmel’s post-midterms show. It will mark Pod Save America’s fourth appearance on Jimmy Kimmel Live! and its 16th on a broadcast late-night show, not counting solo appearances by individual hosts.
For decades, late-night hosts turned to network news stars when they wanted someone to interpret Washington. Tom Brokaw, Dan Rather, and Ted Koppel all made the rounds. Brian Williams became such a fixture in late night that he reportedly lobbied NBC for the chance to succeed Jay Leno as host of The Tonight Show. (Ironically, it was a late-night appearance—his 2013 retelling to David Letterman of his Iraq helicopter story—that would ultimately cost him his NBC Nightly News anchor chair.)
The value of those bookings rested largely on the idea that the person doing the explaining stood apart from the political fight.
Kimmel once made liberal use of the ABC News bench, booking Diane Sawyer, Charlie Gibson, Barbara Walters, Robin Roberts, Stephanopoulos, and David Muir. Muir alone appeared four times between 2014 and 2017.
But Kimmel was changing. His May 2017 monologue about his newborn son Billy’s heart condition and Obamacare’s protections for people with pre-existing conditions marked the beginning of a much more political version of Jimmy Kimmel Live! Muir’s final appearance came that September, a week after another series of high-profile Kimmel monologues opposing the Graham-Cassidy health care bill. No ABC News anchor has appeared on the show since Robin Roberts in February 2021.
Whether Kimmel stopped calling or ABC’s anchors stopped answering, the old arrangement was disappearing.
By 2026, it has become harder to imagine still. ABC and Disney have faced unusual scrutiny from the FCC under Trump-appointed chairman Brendan Carr over both the network’s news operation and Kimmel. An ABC News anchor sitting down with Kimmel to interpret the political moment would now come with baggage that simply wasn’t there a decade ago.
By the time Kimmel first booked Pod Save America, the podcast had already become a familiar presence with Colbert. All told, its hosts appeared on The Late Show 11 times, eight of those visits tied to major political moments, including both Trump inaugurations and live shows following a State of the Union address, a presidential debate, and the Republican National Convention. Colbert also booked Lovett solo in 2019.
Kimmel first brought Pod Save America on in November 2023, the night of that year’s off-year elections. The podcast hosts returned the night after the 2024 presidential election and again after Trump’s 2026 State of the Union. Tuesday will make four Kimmel appearances. Lovett also appeared solo this past April.
There are practical reasons they keep getting the call.
All four hosts worked in the Obama administration, giving them the insider credentials to explain how campaigns and White Houses operate. They’re also practiced at turning that analysis into entertainment: interrupting one another, making jokes, disagreeing, and talking politics without making it sound like a panel discussion.
Their popularity doesn’t hurt, either. Pod Save America has become one of the most prominent political podcasts in the country, and the fit with Kimmel—and Colbert before him—is as much tonal as ideological. All three have built audiences in part by treating politics as something that can be analyzed seriously without abandoning comedy.
And unlike the network anchors who once occupied this role, nobody expects the Pod Save America hosts to stand outside the political fight. Their point of view is part of the product.
That gives them room an anchor simply doesn’t have. They can advocate for Democrats, criticize them, second-guess campaign decisions, speculate about what comes next, and joke about all of it without having to maintain the appearance of neutrality.
The full scope of this year’s midterm election will almost certainly still be unresolved when Kimmel tapes tonight’s show before polls close on the West Coast. But that only makes the booking more familiar: when the political picture is murky, bring out the explainers.
In that respect, at least, the job hasn’t changed much since Stephanopoulos sat down with Kimmel in 2020.
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