WATCH: Election Eve Interview with Obama

The HBO Real Time with Bill Maher host, who had campaigned for months and launched an online petition to win the president over, sat down for a nearly 40-minute taped interview with Obama that aired Friday night. When asked how voters will go on Election Day between Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump, Obama said  the choice should be very clear. “Every single issue we’ve made progress on in the last eight years is going to be on the ballot in the form of this choice,” Obama told Maher. "Anybody who’s sitting on the sidelines right now, or deciding to engage in a protest vote, that’s a vote for Trump."

And that would be badly damaging for this country and badly damaging for the world.

Obama also expressed his concern regarding the partisanship of news outlets, saying the "Balkanization" of U.S. media leaves the public with "difficulty sorting out what's true and what's not." “If you don’t have some common baseline of facts —it’s very hard to figure out how we move democracy forward,” Obama said.

“If I watched Fox News, I wouldn’t vote for me either.”