About every four years, Steve Kornacki becomes a reluctant internet celebrity. The comedian Leslie Jones has called him “the sexiest nerd on TV.” People magazine agrees. His go-to outfit — glasses, a white dress shirt, a tie and khaki or dark pants — is a trendy Halloween costume in some Washington circles.
I’m not sure I really understand it, but I’m flattered, said Kornacki, a national political correspondent for NBC News who becomes an object of desire during election cycles for his adroitness with a large touch screen and his analysis of electoral maps and polling data.
At one point in November, Kornacki spent about 17 consecutive hours on air. That was a cakewalk compared with 2020, when the presidential election was not called for four days. He slept a total of 10 hours that week with a couple of naps at his desk.
After that exhausting stretch, NBC Sports asked Kornacki whether he would bring his data presentation skills to “Football Night in America,” its Sunday night studio show, to dissect the playoff chances of National Football League teams. Kornacki, who grew up in Massachusetts as a New England Patriots and Boston Celtics fan, accepted the additional responsibilities, saying he would have been watching football anyway.
Similar to election night, when Kornacki explains which states could enable a candidate to reach 270 electoral college votes, his football segments untangle the best paths forward, including the must-win games for teams still mathematically alive in the playoff hunt.
We’re looking at scenarios, we’re looking at variables, we’re looking at probabilities and that’s exactly what I’m doing for a campaign, Kornacki said.
Kornacki graduated from Boston University and worked at various outlets before co-hosting an MSNBC show in 2012. He became a mainstay for election coverage in 2014, but his social media stardom came in 2020, when viewers flocked to televisions for an important election during the coronavirus pandemic.
Kornacki said the coverage most likely resonated because he and the viewers were absorbing the onslaught of information together.
It’s a really shared experience where I’m seeing things on the screen for the first time, and they’re seeing something on the screen for the first time, he said.
Kornacki prepares for an election throughout the year, but the process intensifies about six months out. It is particularly important, he said, to study demographic data in battleground states and counties. He uses spreadsheets and maps to memorize the information so he can immediately recall it on television when discussing voting patterns.
Kristen Welker, who anchors “Meet the Press,” NBC’s Sunday morning public affairs show, said she was impressed during a segment in October when Kornacki outlined how Democrats in Pennsylvania had lost support between the 2012 and 2020 elections in some counties with growing Latino populations. Donald J. Trump, the Republican nominee, won the coveted swing state weeks later.
In many ways, he holds up a mirror to the country to say, “This is who we are right now and this is where we’re headed,” said Welker, who in 2020 moderated a presidential debate.
Political enthusiasts and die-hard sports fans may seem to have little overlap, but they are both passionate television audiences.
It’s kind of hard to ignore, Kornacki said. On a very basic level, these are both contests that are going to have a winner at the end of the day, and the winner is the product of the numbers that go into it.
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