Steve Kornacki’s Election Day Windup: Spreadsheets, Coffee, Anxiety

It’s an immaculate autumn day in New York City — sunny, low dew point, light breeze — but Steve Kornacki is holed up behind a comically oversized computer monitor in his office inside NBC’s labyrinthine Rockefeller Center studio complex. NBC’s chief data analyst has not gotten outside much this month. 

He never does in an election year. The weeks leading up to the big day are always packed with meetings and rehearsals and media interviews (like this one) while, Kornacki says, “the thing I really want to be doing is spreadsheets, maps, prep, you know? I feel like I’m cramming for a final exam.” 

In the small snatches of time he can find between obligations, Kornacki secludes himself here, behind this ludicrously elongated desktop screen, to pore over his spreadsheets. For as wide as Kornacki’s computer is — “People knock on the door and I can’t see them,” he says. “I don’t, I don’t need it. They insisted on it.” — the document he’s inspecting is somehow wider.

This morning, after filming a Today segment and before my arrival, he stole away for a few minutes of scrolling through this Michigan data set. It is made up of thousands of cells representing the vote share of every demographic group — broken out by age, race, gender, household income, etc. — for all 83 counties across the state in every major election dating back several years.

Familiarity with the contents of this document will come in handy at 8 p.m. on Tuesday, Nov. 3  when the polls close in the Midwest battleground and the returns start trickling in. That’s when Kornacki will be paying particular attention to the results from Wayne County (where much of the state’s Arab-American and Muslim population lives, and where, he points out, Democratic turnout “fell off a cliff” two years ago) and Oakland County, home to the highest concentration of Michigan’s Jewish voters. (If Democrat Abdul El-Sayed’s margin is in the single digits there on Tuesday night, Kornacki says, “it’s advantage [Mike] Rogers statewide.”)

A fixture of MSNBC’s election night broadcasts for the last decade, in his rolled up shirtsleeves and New Balance sneakers, Kornacki built a loyal following for his equally animated and authoritative delivery of such granular analysis. Viewers’ appetite for his sensible chinos and Rain Man-like recall of precinct-level American political history has only continued to grow with each successive, high-stakes political contest. 

This fall, NBC (which retained custody of Kornacki after spinning his former cable news home off into a standalone property, MS NOW, last year) unveiled an election coverage plan that includes a 13-hour television broadcast — from 5 p.m. on Tuesday until the crack of dawn Wednesday morning — and simultaneous “Kornacki Cam” livestream on YouTube for hardcore fans of the network’s numbers guy.

“I have a lot of anxiety about it, to be honest,” Kornacki tells me. “I get anxiety about every election because the more I do these, the more I learn, but also the more I become aware of how much I don’t know. There’s sort of a serenity in ignorance that I think I benefited from earlier in my career.”

Any number of things could go wrong, hypothetically, over the course of 13 uninterrupted hours. Kornacki recalls with particular horror a moment during the 2016 broadcast as the possibility of a Trump victory was becoming increasingly plausible, when he was asked to illustrate the electoral math it would take for the former Celebrity Apprentice host to claim the presidency. 

“I did this whole five-minute windup for this payoff of: And that’s how he gets 271!” But instead of projecting the narrow victory in the Electoral College he was trying to illustrate, the board flashed electoral math that inexplicably added up to 700. “I think I said on the air: This piece of garbage!” (He hastens to add: “We have a great tech team. This thing has advanced light years in time — but there’s always risks like that.”)

To stave off the possibility of such perils, Kornacki is logging hours of practice at the “Big Board” alongside his longtime producer, Adam Noboa, who has recently assumed the role of onscreen sidekick. (Kornacki was referring questions to Noboa so often on a primary night last December that executives insisted on mic’ing the producer up.)

The giant touchscreen Kornacki uses to display his maps and statistics will be bigger this year: 96 inches across, compared to the older model’s 84. (And while that’s massive, it is not, I’m told, the biggest big board in TV news. That distinction belongs to Telemundo, but it apparently comes with pitfalls of its own: some smaller-statured personalities can’t reach the navigation bar that runs along the top of the touchscreen.)

The technology has come a long way since 2000, the year Kornacki remembers watching NBC News’ Tim Russert scribbling on a white board. The races have become more sharply contested in the intervening years, as well. Landslides, Kornacki points out, used to be the norm: “Reagan wins 44 states in 1980, 49 in 1984. Bush wins 40 in 1988, Clinton 32 in 1992. It was very decisive.”

“Since 2000, with the exception of Obama’s win in ’08, these campaigns have been fought between the 45 yard lines — whoever wins, it’s going to be by a pretty small margin. It’s very competitive. There’s a lot of suspense,” he says. “I can’t imagine doing what I do, say, 25 years ago, because the elections would have had a lot of nights where at 8:01 p.m it’s: All right, folks, wrap it up. Good night. We’ll see you in four years!” 

Kornacki will have the opposite problem on Tuesday, of course. He’s soothing nerves about it by switching to decaf today (“which I don’t normally do, but I was feeling a little extra anxiety,” he says) and touching grass: “If I get outside and walk for 20 minutes, that helps.” There’s a small park on the Hudson River that’s a brisk stroll from Rockefeller Center; he can make it there and back to the office — and his precious spreadsheets — in less than a half an hour.