When Jon Stewart announced he was leaving The Daily Show in February of 2015, he couldn’t have known how insane the 2016 presidential election would become. He did, however, see some of the writing on the wall. The final weeks of Stewart’s run coincided with President-Elect Donald Trump deciding whether to get into the race. “If Trump’s not running,” Stewart joked at the time, “then these last shows are going to be nothing but a cup of hot sadness.” But Trump did run, against a Democratic candidate who was fighting an uphill battle—sometimes against her own party—and, for the first time in 16 years, Jon Stewart wasn’t here to help us laugh about it. In the massive vacuum created by his exit and Stephen Colbert’s relocation, nobody else was able to step up to the plate. In 2016, TV political satire let us down—and helped bring us President-Elect Trump.

Even Colbert and Stewart together weren’t up to the task; see the duo’s final contribution to this election cycle, the oddly softball, candy-coated musical they performed on the eve of the election on CBS. Stewart, in red top hat and sash, was playing a character so far removed from the authentically sincere persona he established at The Daily Show that it was hard to take any of the points they were trying to make (Trump’s worse!) seriously through all the mugging, giggling, and grinning.

But when Stewart went on a (censored) rant on Colbert’s show back in July, he gave us a taste of what his special brand of rare-but-blistering anger could have looked like this election season It was the instantly familiar guiding voice we greatly missed in 2016. With television populated by so many of Stewart’s former acolytes, why was no one else able to emulate it?

Colbert—as has been amply discussed elsewhere—was somewhat hamstrung by his move from cable to network TV. The host started his CBS tenure with a galling on-air apology to Trump in September of 2015, well after Trump’s outrageous comments about Mexican immigrants. So even when Colbert decided to start digging into the candidate, his credibility was somewhat compromised, and his content confined to the gentler rules of network television. When finally granted the freedom of a Showtime special on Election Night, Colbert could only provide the grim specter of unfunny jokes that devolved into a despairing farewell: “We, as a nation, agree that we should never, ever have another election like this one.”

On cable, Colbert’s fellow Daily Show alums and the show itself were all hampered by Peak TV–weakened ratings; in essence, they split the vote. After the departure of Stewart, a liberal, comedic Walter Cronkite for 1.5 million loyal viewers, The Daily Show’s ratings were slashed in half when new host Trevor Noah took over. Samantha Bee, with a show airing weekly on TBS, averaged 850,000 viewers in the weeks leading up to the election; John Oliver, on HBO, had 1 million.

Bee earned devotees among the entrenched left as she refused to hide her pro-Hillary Clinton bias. She and Oliver both prefer angrily yelling their points, an approach that energized some (including this writer), but turned off others who had enough yelling from the candidates themselves. But even Oliver, despite one searing-yet-late-in-the-game takedown of Trump, has admitted he missed the mark with the Republican candidate. “No outcome is certain,” Oliver told his audience the Sunday before the election, “so if you are thinking you don’t have to show up on Tuesday because there is no way the impossible could happen, take it from somebody who has learned from painful experience: you are wrong about that.”