Steve Kornacki Isn’t Just an Election Night “Chart-Throb”
What does Steve Kornacki do when there isn't an election? Learn about the NBC News and MSNBC correspondent’s other jobs and roles.
May 24 2022, Published 3:57 p.m. ET
You’ve seen him covering the 2022 midterm primaries in recent days — and the Kentucky Derby, for that matter — but what does Steve Kornacki do when there isn't an election or (literal) horse race to cover?
It’s a valid question! Kornacki is officially a national political correspondent for NBC News and MSNBC, but he’s best known for his election coverage.
In fact, People even named Kornacki one of the Sexiest Men of the Year in 2020, days after that year’s presidential election. “Never before have khakis and a striped tie gotten so many hot under the (Oxford) collar,” the magazine raved. “The MSNBC journalist’s tireless coverage tracking the long post-election day vote tallying process earned him the title of ‘Chart-throb’ — with celebrity fans from Chrissy Teigen to Leslie Jones — and even caused a significant spike in Gap’s khaki sales.”
Kornacki is a journalist with countless bylines.
According to his MSNBC bio, Kornacki grew up in Groton, Mass., and graduated from Boston University. As a journalist, he has written for the Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, The Boston Globe, and The Daily Beast, among other publications. He was also the politics editor of Salon, and he publicly came out as gay in a 2011 essay on that site.
Before joining MSNBC as a contributor in 2010, Kornacki honed his screen presence at News 12 New Jersey, co-hosting a weekly series on the 24-hour cable news channel.
Once he joined MSNBC, Konacki hosted the 4 p.m. EST hour of MSNBC Live, the Monday installments of MTP Daily, and the weekend morning show Up With Steve Kornacki. He also hosted the NBC News podcast Article II: Inside Impeachment.
Kornacki turned his election research into the book "The Red and the Blue."
Kornacki is the author of The Red and the Blue: The 1990s and the Birth of Political Tribalism, a 2018 book that tracks partisanship from the Clinton era to the Trump years.
He told BookPage in 2018 that he got the idea for the book about nine years prior. “I was looking back at election nights from the ’80s, when there were coast-to-coast landslides, and I was realizing how far we’ve come from that,” he said. “No one is about to win 49 states these days, but back then it happened, and the ’90s were sort of the bridge between the two ― the decade when the red and blue America were born and the divide we live with today was created.”
Kornacki got an expanded role at NBCUniversal last year.
In May 2021, TVNewser reported that Kornacki’s role at NBCUniversal was expanding and his analytical insights would extend to the company’s entertainment and sports coverage across linear and streaming television. As part of that expansion, Kornacki was tapped to cover the Tokyo Olympics and the Beijing Olympics with NBC Sports and to develop a game show with NBCUniversal’s Television and Streaming Entertainment division.
“Steve brings so much passion and genuine enthusiasm to his work, on top of his encyclopedic knowledge base, that it’s just impossible as a viewer not to share his interest and excitement,” NBCUniversal News Group chairman Cesar Conde said in a statement at the time. “His interests really vary — so we’re fortunate to have a wider NBCU portfolio that’s equally dynamic.”
