“So your car is driving a little erratically, it’s still driving, but there are things you could do,” Walz said, sitting at a table at Johnson Hall coffeehouse in all-important Bucks County, Pennsylvania. “And now, if it’s an older vehicle, you can have a carburetor cleaned on it. You can invest the money in a very important part, for example the carburetor, namely the middle class. You made some investment in that carburetor. The entire vehicle drives better. This provides oxygen to the entire system.”

He added: “So you invest in the middle class… the middle class makes everything else work.”

Of course, it wouldn’t be a Walz interview if there wasn’t also a sports metaphor.

“We know we’re in the last two minutes of this game,” he told Colbert. “We are going to give 110 percent, we know we have to leave it on the field, because look, democracy is at stake here.”

Jimmy Kimmel, meanwhile, struck a darker, more ominous tone on election night. The host of “Jimmy Kimmel Live!” drew attention to tapes posted by The Daily Beast over the weekend in which Jeffrey Epstein, the high-flying financier who committed suicide while awaiting trial on child sex trafficking charges, tells author Michael Wolff that he was Donald Trump’s best friend for a decade was .

Kimmel said he is shocked that Epstein’s comments about Trump, recorded two years before Epstein was found dead in his prison cell in 2019, have attracted so little attention.

“Remember when Mitt Romney went down for putting a dog carrier on the roof of his car? We just had 100 hours of Jeffrey Epstein saying he and Trump were best friends,” Kimmel said. “I didn’t even get a notification about it on my phone. I didn’t get any texts about this.’

Kimmel added: “Do you know what kind of low life you have to be before Jeffrey Epstein says you have no moral compass? It’s like R. Kelly got mad at you for leaving the toilet seat up.”

Mark Shanahan can be reached at [email protected]. Follow him @MarkAShanahan.