Steve Kornacki is a National Political Correspondent for NBC News and the data analyst for MSNBC’s election night coverage. Kornacki sat down with The HPR for a brief chat about the state of 2024 Republican primaries and how to best engage with political media before his Feb. 14 appearance at the John F. Kennedy Jr. Forum.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
Harvard Political Review: We’re currently in an era where there’s a constant stream of information at all hours. I think that MSNBC’s “Kornacki Cam” on Election Nights, which is a live feed of you scrambling to keep track of incoming data, is a perfect representation of that fact. How should we, as individual spectators who don’t have constant access to the Magic Wall, separate the signal from the noise?
Steve Kornacki: That’s the problem of having the sophistication that we have now, in terms of the available data and in terms of the delivery. It’s almost information overload. And I think there’s a lot of out-of-context pieces of data out there that can take you down the totally wrong road. Polling, for example: There’s issues with it. I don’t think it’s as bad as people think, but it’s definitely not perfect. And I think the best thing you can do with polling is look at an average. And it’s because you can get one poll that looks way too high for one candidate or another. And to the extent polls are useful, the truth is kind of revealed over time, and with multiple pollsters finding the same result, the same trend. So I always say, if you look at a poll and you’re surprised or taken aback or whatever, look at the average and follow that and let that be the signal. It’s still not perfect, but it’s a lot better than going poll-by-poll.
HPR: Looking at the polling averages in the 2024 Republican primary, Donald Trump has clearly been doing incredibly well compared to the competition. Do you think that it’s useful to continue covering this race the same way that we traditionally cover primaries when there’s such a distinct difference from previous years in terms of vote margins?
SK: I think the coverage has changed a little even in the last few weeks. We’re certainly still covering the race, we’re covering Nikki Haley. We will cover the South Carolina results. But at the same time, I think this is a lower wattage race in a lot of ways, including the media coverage, since Iowa, since New Hampshire, and even since Nevada last week. And there’s more of a burden right now, I think, on Haley to prove that this is still a race that everybody should be following closely. I think she’s got that chance in South Carolina. And if she can do it, I think that coverage will change. But I think that’s part of it. She’s just not proven she can win or even be that competitive. Certainly she has problems clearly with core Republican voters. And until and unless she can address that, I think you’re just gonna see probably the whole political world turning away from the primary.
HPR: Something that I’m really interested in is the way in which the media can actually set and change the public narrative — I think we saw that pretty clearly with the Dominion Voting Systems lawsuit against Fox News. How do you think about your role in setting what the narrative of the day is as an analyst whom many people turn to for information?
SK: I try to follow one basic rule, recognizing that we live in a time when information is kind of siloed by political parties. There’s a lot of blue media. There’s a lot of red media. There’s not nearly as much in-the-middle media as there used to be. So my rule is: If I’m in front of a blue audience, am I saying the same thing I’d be saying in front of a red audience? If I’m in front of a red audience, am I saying the same thing I’d be saying in front of a blue audience? And I try to pose that question to myself all the time. And I think as long as my answer is yes, I think it’s fine. But I try to be aware of that because I think that’s a challenge for somebody in my role. You don’t want to ever be shading what you’re saying for a particular audience. You’ve got to be willing to say the same thing to everybody, even if they don’t want to hear it.
HPR: You put out a podcast recently, “The Revolution with Steve Kornacki.” You also wrote a book, “The Red and the Blue: The 1990s and the Birth of Political Tribalism.” Both of them focused on the politics of the 1990s and relating them to the politics of today. What is so interesting to you about that moment, and what do you think it has to say about our current politics?
SK: I guess the easy answer is it’s nostalgia for me. It’s when I grew up, and kind of learned politics for the first time. So I was kind of going down memory lane there and learning new things about stuff I thought I knew, so that was just a fun process. But the reason why I think I did the book and I did the podcast too is I think the 90s were a big pivot-point. The story of the 20th century has been rising polarization, and real tribalism in our politics. The vast majority of people now consider themselves part of team red, or part of team blue. What they used to call split ticket voting — voting for a Republican for president, and a Democrat for Senate — is at an all-time low. There’s almost no state now that’s represented by Democratic and Republican senators; there’s a few of them, but it’s the exception, not the rule anymore.
And when I thought back, I thought to myself, these concepts, red and blue, didn’t even exist in 1996. Nobody talked about them. And the moment when I think it changed was when that election map on election night 2000 came into view. And it just so happened every network was using red and blue for the two parties. And the entire Northeast was blue. The Pacific Coast was blue. The South, the interior, was all red. And those upper Midwest states were blue. And you really saw the political divisions in the country so clearly on that map, and that’s where people started talking about red states and blue states. And I think it was the political combat of the 90s that led to that moment in 2000. I think that moment in 2000 created the world we’ve been living in for a generation since.
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