NBC’s gay data nerd Steve Kornacki is set to dominate election-night forecasting, one precinct at a time

Nine months ago, Steve Kornacki was part of NBC’s Super Bowl coverage. On Tuesday night, he will be covering his real Super Bowl, the U.S. midterms elections, as the network’s chief data analyst.

Kornacki, who came out as gay in 2011, will be fired up as the first results come in shortly after 6 p.m. EST. Wearing his signature khakis, white shirt and tie without a jacket, Kornacki will geek out as he parses the results from the Kentucky 6th Congressional District, considered an early bellwether.

For 13 hours, starting at 5 p.m. EST Tuesday, NBC will roll out the “Kornacki Cam,” which has gotten millions of views in the primary season. Along with the livestream, Kornacki will provide on-camera analysis for NBC. Since some races won’t be called election night, expect the livestream to busy all week and maybe even beyond.

A Rolling Stone profile described Kornacki’s election year routine, which is akin to an athlete preparing for a sports event.

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.

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The sports analogy is apt, because the 47-year-old Kornacki is a huge sports fan, growing up in Massachusetts. When he is not crunching election data, Kornacki works for NBC Sports, doing deep dives into areas like playoff possibilities in the NFL or medal chances for countries and athletes in the Olympics.

In his coming out essay in Salon in 2011, Kornacki wrote about how he felt he never fit in with the gay community because of his personality and love of sports.

“After a trip to Cape Cod with a friend and his family, the kid’s mother said her favorite moment was watching ‘straitlaced Steve’ struggling to make sense of all the hedonism around him when we drove out to Provincetown. I remember seeing drag queens and men dressed in skimpy attire and thinking to myself: Get me out of here so I can watch a baseball game.

“I just didn’t fit the stereotypes of gay men. I was an ESPN [fan] as far back as elementary school. I’d also had early crushes on girls.”

What Kornacki discovered after he came out was that (in a good way) nobody cared that he was gay, nor did they abandon him. “The biggest revelation has been just how much of a nonissue this is to just about everyone else,” he said.

Kornacki was named one of People’s “Sexiest Men Alive” after his 2020 election breakout. He made khakis cool and his boyish enthusiasm makes politics come alive for an appreciative audience, as we’ll see again Tuesday.

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