Ronny Chieng's Election Day Daily Show Hit 3 Million Views. Don Jr. Brought Ohio

Ronny Chieng hosted The Daily Show on Election Day, Tuesday, Nov. 3, and the YouTube upload of that night's episode had passed 3 million views by Thursday. That's ahead of the next night's midterm-results segment at about 2.6 million, and well ahead of everything else the show posted this week. The episode's own title promises a voter in labor and some 'hot Dems,' but the part the internet kept passing around was a man accidentally discovering a state.

On the eve of the vote, Donald Trump Jr. joined JD Vance at a rally in Ohio for Vivek Ramaswamy and Jon Husted and warned the crowd that Democrats want to pack the Supreme Court and make Ohio a state. There was a pause, the kind you hear at a wedding when the best man mentions the first wife, and he corrected himself to D.C. Ohio has been a state since 1803. He was standing in it.

Chieng's response was to agree with him. Politics aside, he said, Ohio should not be a state, and he was off. It's the right instinct. The temptation with a gaffe like that is to explain it, and a gaffe explained is a frog dissected: you understand it better and it's no longer funny. Chieng just walked through the open door, which is the job, and the reason his Daily Show weeks keep pulling numbers that would make most network hosts check whether the counter is broken.

A word for Don Jr., who is often treated unfairly by people who say he got where he is because of his father. That's not fair. He also got there because of his father's money, and because of his father's name. Three things. The man is a self-made son.

It says something that the most-watched clip of a historic election night was a guy reading a teleprompter wrong in the state he was reading it in. Voters picked the Congress; YouTube picked the best mistake. A country gets the government it votes for, but it gets the jokes it deserves.