Numlock Sunday: March 24, 2019

By Walt Hickey

Welcome to the Numlock Sunday edition. Each week, I'll sit down with a writer behind one of the stories covered in a previous weekday edition for a casual conversation about the story they wrote.

This week, I spoke to Morning Consult’s Sarah Shevenock who wrote As Late-Night Hosts Get Political, Audiences Get Divided. Here's what I wrote about it:

Late-night television is a fearsome battleground and the desire to electrify audiences may lead some late-night comedians to wander into, dare I say it, sensitive topics like politics. Some lean into it harder than others. As a result, according to a new Morning Consult survey more Democrats than Republicans had favorable opinions of literally every single late-night host. Stephen Colbert had the widest spread — a 38 percentage point difference between favorability among Democrats and Republicans — a figure that is higher even than The Daily Show’s Trevor Noah and, no joke, Bill Maher, a person who has dedicated his entire profe…