Stephen Colbert Travels to Philadelphia for Election Eve Tim Walz Interview: “The Choice Is So Stark”

Stephen Colbert traveled to Philadelphia for his election eve Late Show interview with Tim Walz, where the high school football coach-turned-vice presidential candidate gave America a final pep talk ahead of Tuesday.

“Gov. Walz could not come to the Ed Sullivan Theater due to the fact that this building is not a swing state,” Colbert quipped on Monday night, before the show cut to a pre-recorded interview with Kamala Harris‘ running mate, filmed at the Johnson Hall coffee house in Bucks County, Pennsylvania.

To start the interview, Colbert asked Walz about his highs and lows of the campaign trail — when the veep candidate said there were no lows, the Late Show host asked “not even sharing the stage with J.D. Vance?”

“OK, that was not great,” Walz admitted.

(The highs? “Seeing my former students,” Walz said. “A lot of them come back… I’ll see them at events all over.”)

Walz’s 10-minute softball interview covered the story of how he met his wife, Gwen, his affinity for Diet Mountain Dew and the best Midwestern insults — “I’m not angry with you, I’m angry with your behavior.” The duo also played a round of paper football.

When asked if he was surprised by the tied election polls, Walz said no. “It disappoints me, because I think that the choice is so stark,” he said. “But it’s not surprising, the country’s really divided.”

He went on to explain, per Colbert’s request, the concept of an opportunity economy through the language of car repair.

“So your car is running a little rough, it’s still running but there’s things that you could do,” Walz said. “And now, if it’s an older vehicle, you can get a carburetor clean on it. You can invest the money into a really important piece, say the carburetor, being the middle class. You put a little investment into that carburetor. The entire vehicle runs better. That brings oxygen into the entire system. So you invest in the middle class… the middle class makes everything else work.”

The segment ended with Walz’s pep talk. “We know that we’re in the final two minutes of this game,” he said. “We’re going to give 110 percent, we know we have to leave it on field because, look, democracy is at stake here.”

Last Week Tonight host John Oliver joined Colbert after Walz, where the two comedians spoke about their experiences covering Donald Trump for nearly ten years now.

“2016 came, and it has never left,” Colbert said. “We have been in the 2016 news cycle for eight years now.”

Colbert also played a 2015 Late Show clip of Oliver saying he “didn’t care” about Donald Trump announcing his first run for president. “Wouldn’t it be great to go back to a time like that?” Colbert said on Monday.

Oliver agreed, saying, “I still don’t give a s— about him, I just have to. I just want to be in the situation where I don’t have to care anymore. So I go back to my original state, which is, this guy means nothing. So that’s what I want to happen so much.”

Elsewhere in he interview, Colbert asked Oliver about Elon Musk’s one-sided feud with the Last Week Tonight comedian.

“I think one of the things is he clearly loves comedy,” Oliver said of the billionaire Trump supporter, who frequently goes after Oliver online. “So he wants to be funny. And unfortunately, money can’t buy you that — so deep down, he’s never going to be funny, and that must be eating him alive, because he’s trying so hard to be funny. And every time he tries, it must make it seem further away from him, that laugh that he’s always chasing but will never catch up with. And that is going to be a vacuum of the center of his soul for a long time.”