Preet Bharara:

From CAFE and the Vox Media Podcast Network, this is Stay Tuned In Brief. We’re now just about three weeks away from the presidential election, and the race remains tight, and swing states will likely decide the outcome. What are the key battlegrounds this year? Which voters are shaping the race for the White House? And how can we make sense of the polls? Joining me to discuss is Steve Kornacki. Steve is National Political Correspondent for NBC News and MSNBC, and he and his fan-favorite electoral map have been covering all the latest political news this election season. Steve, welcome to the show, it’s a real treat.

Steve Kornacki:

Preet, thank you for having me. I’m glad to be here.

Preet Bharara:

Although this is an audio format, I have to begin my questioning with this. Are you wearing khaki pants?

Steve Kornacki:

No, I’m not. I’m wearing comfortable pants.

Preet Bharara:

Comfortable, not-khaki pants. The record will reflect. Are you anywhere near a scoreboard of any kind?

Steve Kornacki:

One of my tabs is ESPN.com, so I guess that counts.

Preet Bharara:

Okay, so let’s get to it. We have a few weeks left before the election, although I guess that’s a misnomer, because early voting begins in various places, so that’s just the end of the election. And so the subject for today is swing states. How many swing states are there?

Steve Kornacki:

We say there are seven core battleground states.

Preet Bharara:

And how do you define swing state? How close does the race have to be in a state for you to call it a swing state?

Steve Kornacki:

I think it’s a combination of how close it was in the last election, how close it’s been, how much money, how much energy is being expended by each campaign. Are they sort of backing up the perception of the state as a swing state by actually treating it as a swing state? And then the polls in all these states, if you just average them, are no more than 2.5, 3 points in either direction.

Preet Bharara:

Are any of these seven, I’m going to name them, because I think I know what they are. Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, Michigan, North Carolina, Georgia, Arizona, Nevada. Are those the seven?

Steve Kornacki:

Seven for seven.

Preet Bharara:

Seven for seven, are those the same seven you would’ve called swing states in 2020 and 2016?

Steve Kornacki:

No, it is a good question, because it’s a great thing for people to think about. I always, there’s an analogy here I think to that, what’s that thing about the frog who’s in the water? That they’re slowly raising the temperature when it comes to… Yeah, you never notice, and I feel it’s the same with sort of the political map of the country. There are these changes that kind of happen and you don’t really notice a minute by minute, and then you look up and you realize how much everything’s changed. Four years ago at this time we were talking about Florida, and Ohio, and Iowa as swing states.

Preet Bharara:

Those are now firmly in the GOP column?

Steve Kornacki:

That’s right. These are states that went, Ohio, went 8 points for Trump in 2020 on top of going 8 points for him in 2016. But folks who have a long memory with this stuff, I suspect some in this audience might, political junkies out there, you might remember the 2004 election came down to Ohio. It was the king of swing states 20 years ago. Florida, the 2000 election. Tim Russert, Florida, Florida, Florida.

Preet Bharara:

So what’s happened in the last, not even decade, to push Florida, Ohio and Iowa red?

Steve Kornacki:

One word, Trump. Donald Trump’s emergence has scrambled aspects of our politics. It’s scrambled aspects of each party’s demographic coalition, and it’s accelerated some of the demographic transformations that were already happening within each party’s coalition. And that has really affected a state like Iowa, a state like Ohio. These are states that have large sort of blue collar, white populations, populations of older blue collar, white voters, and these are voters who voted democratic, not just at the presidential level, but in all sorts of state elections, congressional elections, right through really until Donald Trump came along. And his rise kind of precipitated this huge shift in those states among those voters, and really realigned them. That same type of voter, a blue collar, white voter, I mean, we would say sort of statistically a white voter without a four-year degree. When you look in the south at a state like Georgia for instance, that realignment had happened a long time ago, so the shift wasn’t as perceptible. But in those sort of Upper Midwest, Midwest states, it’s been huge.

Preet Bharara:

So we talked about three states that used to be battleground states, not so much anymore, swing states. Are there any states that are not on this list of seven that used to be, that went in favor solidly for Democrats in the last number of years?

Steve Kornacki:

Sure. I think Virginia would be at the top of that list. And I mean-

Preet Bharara:

I remember being in my 20s or my 30s and Virginia was pretty solidly red, wasn’t it?

Steve Kornacki:

I was going to say, yeah. Not just from, I mean, it had a very short period as an actual swing state. It went from red in 2000, 2004. It was legitimately a swing state in ’08 and ’12, and by ’16 we were treating it as a blue state. So it really got two cycles there kind of as a swing.

Preet Bharara:

We still call it a southern state though, right?

Steve Kornacki:

That’s an interesting debate.

Preet Bharara:

Where exactly is the Mason-Dixon line?

Steve Kornacki:

I call it Northern Virginia, and then the rest of Virginia.

Preet Bharara:

And it’s Northern Virginia that’s really catapulted that state into the Democratic column?

Steve Kornacki:

That’s a very large part of it when you talk about Fairfax County, Alexandria, Arlington, but also there’s been pretty significant movement in the Richmond suburbs, the traditionally Republican Richmond suburbs. They are still much more politically competitive than the immediate DC area and Northern Virginia, but Democrats have had substantial growth there. And then I think the sort of the toss up region would be the Hampton Roads, Norfolk, Virginia Beach, that area.

Preet Bharara:

Interesting. There are some states on the battleground list that I recited earlier, given this conversation, that used to be pretty solidly red and now are toss-ups. Let’s talk about Georgia. What happened there?

Steve Kornacki:

Georgia is demographic transformation is a huge part of it. The Atlanta metro area is one of the fastest growing metros in the United States, just sort of massive in migration population growth. And demographically, the groups that are migrating into that area, you’re seeing a population that’s diversifying, it’s younger, college educated often. These are sort of demographic categories that really favor Democrats. And so you’re just seeing, there’s sort of a nine county core in and around Atlanta, Fulton County where Atlanta is, I call it the blue blob of Georgia, just dramatic population growth in these places.

And it’s just every election, a lot of these counties by leaps and bounds are becoming more democratic. Cobb County, which is right outside Atlanta, kind of a classic Atlanta suburban county. The Atlanta Braves moved up there a few years ago, some folks might remember. This was a core Republican county for decades. George W. Bush, just clobbered Kerry there, Mitt Romney over Obama, and now it’s a double-digit Democratic county. This just happened in the Trump era. In 2016, it was basically dead even, and then in 2020 it was a 14-point Biden win. And it’s massive. It’s massive. It’s growing.

Preet Bharara:

Do you think that Georgia will go the way of Virginia, that in four or eight years we’ll be talking about it as a solidly blue state, or you think it’ll remain a swing state for several cycles?

Steve Kornacki:

It’s offset, what I’m sort of describing there is still offset by, there’s a very large kind of rest of the state area where Republicans still can run up the score, and they still can make up for a lot of what they might lose. I think that where Republicans have to worry, and where I’m going to look in Georgia on election night is just outside that nine county blue blob I’m describing, and there are two counties. One is Cherokee County and one is Forsyth County, and Cherokee County is one of the top, it’s big, and I would say it’s ex-urban in character.

It is one of the top vote producing, plurality-producing, I should say, counties in the United States for the Republican Party. And what’s happened there is Trump will win it, Trump will win it decisively, but we’re seeing a Republican margin that’s come down from a decade ago, like 60 points down to about 40 points. And in a county the size of Cherokee that the Republicans really count on to of, as I say, offset all those other areas, they can’t afford more slippage there, and Forsyth next door, it’s a pretty similar story. So those are two places I’m going to spend an awful lot of time on election night looking. Have the Democrats made further inroads there? Because if it’s down to 35 or something, the math gets very hard for Republicans.

Preet Bharara:

Let’s talk about North Carolina. Do I remember correctly that it was North Carolina that effectively put Barack Obama over the top in ’08?

Steve Kornacki:

He did win it. I’m trying to remember that night too.

Preet Bharara:

I don’t think it gave him 270, but my recollection is, and there was champagne freely flowing where I was, that that seemed to have sealed the deal for him, even if it didn’t put him at 270. But it was a long time ago, so I may have forgotten.

Steve Kornacki:

Sure. Yeah, I mean it was a momentous win for Democrats. Really, there were only one in sort of the modern era in North Carolina, on a night when Obama got up to 365 electoral votes. So it was a huge win for them.

Preet Bharara:

But then not since.

Steve Kornacki:

Yeah, I mean I’d say they did come, they came close in ’12, and I think in the context of 2012, a little closer than some people were expecting. It’s an interesting state because it’s next to Georgia there, but it hasn’t swung and bounced around the way Georgia has, where Georgia was 8 points for Romney, 5 points for Trump, 2016 flips over to Biden. Carolina kind of swings in that… Obama wins it by 2 points, he loses it by 2, Trump wins it by 3, he wins it by 1.5. It’s much less elastic, I think that’s the term that’s kind of in vogue. It’s a less-elastic state politically.

Preet Bharara:

I have a question about Pennsylvania. I want to spend a couple of minutes on Pennsylvania. You wrote recently that when Trump first came on the scene in 2016, the Democratic advantage and party registration in Pennsylvania was over 900,000 votes. It’s almost 1,000,000. And you’re saying in this piece, look at 2024, that’s been cut almost in 2/3s, down to about 330,000. How can you have a 570,000 party registration swing in favor of the Republicans. And the state is still a dead heat?

Steve Kornacki:

It’s related to what I was describing a minute ago about that blue collar, white demographic white voters without four-year degrees in sort of the northern tier of battleground states. These are voters again, who in a lot of cases a decade ago, or even a couple of years ago, might still have just called themselves Democrats. And if they didn’t, many of them were just registered as Democrats, as just sort of an ancestral thing.

Preet Bharara:

So you’re saying that in recent years the party registration didn’t reflect the actual voting habits?

Steve Kornacki:

It did right up until 2016. I mean-

Preet Bharara:

I see, so the party registration is lagging.

Steve Kornacki:

Yeah, by a couple of years, I would say, and I think it’s catching up. And the other thing is just if you really zoom out and look at it over a decades-long thing, there was a huge, this wasn’t just Pennsylvania, there was a huge shift to Democrats when Obama came on the scene ’07, ’08. And in some states there’s just, if you do a line graph, it just explodes with Obama, and there’s sort of a longer term evening out. So it’s a little bit of a long artifact of that too.

Preet Bharara:

Is there a most important swing state among these seven, and if so, why is it Pennsylvania?

Steve Kornacki:

I would look at it as Pennsylvania, just be numerically. I mean it’s 19 electoral votes.

Preet Bharara:

Is that the biggest one of these? Or is-

Steve Kornacki:

Yeah.

Preet Bharara:

Okay.

Steve Kornacki:

And then Georgia, Carolina would both be 16, Michigan would be 15, 11 Arizona, 10 Wisconsin.

Preet Bharara:

So Pennsylvania, is there any, from your reporting or observation, is there any buyer’s remorse on Tim Walz versus Josh Shapiro given the electoral bounty in Pennsylvania?

Steve Kornacki:

To me, that’s the one that’s the post-election. If Harris loses and she loses Pennsylvania, they’re going to blame that. I think that’s going to be the “What if?” that hovers over politics for a few years.

Preet Bharara:

Any other state among the seven that is interesting in your mind? I guess they’re all interesting, but worth commenting on?

Steve Kornacki:

Yeah, the northern ones are to me, just in the sense that you have that added layer of, this is where the polls were off in both ’16 and ’20, and particularly in Wisconsin and Michigan, more so than Pennsylvania.

Preet Bharara:

Yeah. Why were the polls, what’s in the air or the water there that the polls are off?

Steve Kornacki:

Yeah, not to be a broken record, but it’s the blue collar, white demographic, the depth of their support for Trump, the scale of their turnout on election day was not adequately captured in the polling at the state level in either ’16 or ’20. There’s a lot of theories about why those voters were missed, but they were. And so it hovers over those states more than the others. The polling was pretty good actually in Georgia, it was good in Arizona, the misses were Wisconsin and Michigan.

Preet Bharara:

In the science of polling, which I only vaguely understand, is it the case that you have an under-assumption or an over-assumption of a particular category of voter in one cycle? Don’t you then accommodate that and realign your model for the next time? And does that fix the problem, or then do new distortions enter into the fray in those four years rendering polling just inherently these days unstable and unreliable?

Steve Kornacki:

Well, not to get too wonky about it, but the quick history of ’16 to ’24 on this stuff in those states is that traditionally what a lot of pollsters did when they looked at any state was they looked at the broad demographic categories, so by race, white, black, Hispanic, and they would make sure that the pool of respondents reflected what the statewide mix was.

And what happened in 2016 was there’s this trend in our politics, as I said, that exploded when Trump came along where you look at the white vote and you could split it in half, and white voters with four-year degrees are getting more democratic, and now it’s exploded. White voters without four-year degrees are getting more Republican, Trump comes along and it explodes. So there’s a chasm between the two groups right now. And so it turned out when you looked at the 16 polls that just having a representative number of white voters in the poll, if you had too many white voters with college degrees, you didn’t have the right mix, and it skewed your poll. And that’s what happened.

So the fix that was supposed to get this all done for 2020 was, you might’ve heard the term, weeding by education, and they were going to make sure that the white sample now reflected the college, non-college divide, and yet it happened again, the same miss. And so where I think it falls then, the explanation is, you can get… So Trump is going to win the non-college white vote, let’s say by 35 points, 68, 32, something like this.

So you’re taking your poll and you’re trying to make sure you get the right number of white voters without college degrees. Well, if that’s a demographic, if the pro-Trump side of that demographic for whatever reason, lots of theories on it, does not want to take your poll, or is refusing to take your poll, then you’re going to keep poking around, and eventually you’re going to get the much smaller side of that white non-college electorate that’s actually democratic.

And I think that’s what ended up happening in 2020. They got the “right number” of white voters without college degrees, but they happened to get the democratic side of it, which does exist, just in smaller numbers. And so the real question I think that looms over ’24 in the polling in these states now is, whatever that was that was keeping a shy Trump voter effect there, all these theories that have been advanced, has that been addressed? Is that less of a thing? Is that not a thing anymore? Because if it’s not, then these polls are much more accurate.

Preet Bharara:

Is that an ambulance full of Democrats rushing to Pennsylvania?

Steve Kornacki:

I was hoping that wouldn’t… The perils of Midtown Manhattan.

Preet Bharara:

This is… But I want to acknowledge the ambulance. I have a question that occurred to me as you were speaking in trying to figure out how to predict an election. What do you make of these betting sites? Various prominent people, particularly wealthy folks who have a big microphone, I won’t name any names, who turn to the betting sites, which at least in the last few days showed a tilt away from Kamala Harris.

One I saw, I can’t vouch for the popularity of any particular betting site, but it was 54% Trump, 46% Kamala Harris. And people will say, well, these are better and more accurate than the polls, because there’s real money on the line. But the people who are betting don’t know any better than anyone else. Is there any correlation between what the betting sites say and actual election results?

Steve Kornacki:

Yeah, I haven’t looked close enough to give you a definitive answer here. My experience with these in the past, looking at them without any precision has been, I’ve noticed, like when it comes to what I have in my mind here is the Veepstakes. I remember looking at some of the stuff around the Veepstakes this time 2020, and seeing some kind of, what I thought were clearly ridiculous possibilities where it seemed like there was a lot of money in there that if you were kind of reasonably sharp, you could potentially take advantage of. That was my impression of it.

Preet Bharara:

Can we talk about Texas? Is this a quixotic hope of the Democrats to turn that big gigantic warehouse of electoral college votes blue?

Steve Kornacki:

It’s the white whale for them.

Preet Bharara:

We’re always talking about it.

Steve Kornacki:

Right.

Preet Bharara:

That would be game changing. If Texas turned into Virginia, that would be a game change in electoral politics, right?

Steve Kornacki:

Certainly, a state that size. What Democrats are running up against, there’s a couple of things, but the unexpected thing they’re running up against in Texas is what we saw in 2020, and what the polling is suggesting has actually accelerated in 2024, and that is the movement of Hispanic voters away from the Democratic Party that they’ve been more traditionally aligned, and toward the Donald Trump Republican Party.

It was most pronounced in Texas in 2020 in deep south Texas, the Rio Grande Valley around the border, you could light up some of those border counties. I mean, there’s one I have in mind that Hillary Clinton had won. It’s 97% Hispanic, right on the border. Hillary Clinton won it by 60 points in 2016, 6-0, and Joe Biden won it by 5 in 2020.

Preet Bharara:

What happened?

Steve Kornacki:

So a 55-point loss. This is where the Republicans and the Trump Republicans actually have, and this turned up in our recent NBC poll. We took a national poll of Hispanic voters, and we found that Donald Trump has a double-digit advantage over Kamala Harris on the border, and these counties, particularly on the border in Texas, where you saw the most dramatic shift from the Democrats to Trump. And I think the border had a lot to do with that.

I think more broadly when you get away from those counties, there is a broader shift of Hispanic voters away from the Democratic Party. And there you see it, what’s emerging is in age gap and a gender gap. Hispanic voters under 50, much more than Hispanic voters over 50 moving toward the Republicans, male Hispanic voters, much more than female voters. In fact, you really don’t, you barely see it among females. But our NBC national poll of Hispanic voters had the Trump-Harris race essentially tied among men, and Harris up 26 among women, Hispanic women.

Preet Bharara:

I feel like it’s a common refrain among political commentators to say that Trump just plays to his base, whatever that means, that he’s not trying to expand his constituency, and yet he has, hasn’t he, in the way that you describe?

Steve Kornacki:

Yeah, and I think the thing with Trump is you wonder, a lot of campaigns will try to design and draw up the strategy that’s going to win the new constituency. And I suspect that the thing that’s happened with Trump is there’s an improvisational quality to a lot of what he does, and it’s almost accidental, but it happens, and it’s so… I find it one of the incredible ironies of our modern American politics, if you can think back to the end of the 2012 election when Obama beat Romney and the Republican National Committee commissioned what they called their autopsy report on the 2012 election, and they came up with, okay, they said they lost the Hispanic vote by 46 points, and they said, “How are we going to fix this?” And they came up with a roadmap which involved embracing comprehensive immigration reform, path to citizenship, moderating rhetoric on immigration in the border. And what they got in 2016 was Trump. And if the polling is accurate, what’s going to emerge from 2024 win or lose for the Republicans is the most sort of racially and ethnically diverse coalition they’ve put together in modern times.

Preet Bharara:

Maybe the answer to this is Pennsylvania for both subparts of my next question, but maybe not. If you are a enthusiastic Democrat and you want to help Democrats win the White House this November, where is it that you should go volunteer? And same question for a Republican.

Steve Kornacki:

Yeah, I mean it is Pennsylvania’s kind of the boring answer.

Preet Bharara:

It is.

Steve Kornacki:

I only say it because I play with the 270 scenario so much, and just if you lose Pennsylvania, you necessarily have to win two others to make up for it, because nothing else is quite as big. But I would say the one that has game-changing potential, I think either way would be North Carolina, because that’s the one of the seven that was a red state in 2020. The other six were all blue states.

So Trump and the Republicans are playing offense in six swing states, and most of their scenarios kind of assume that they hold North Carolina, the one that they were able to get in ’20. If they lose that, that’s the only one that brings their math backwards, and it’s a big one, 16 electoral votes. So I think for Republicans, you really want to protect that one, because a lot hinges on it. And for Democrats, you could shut a lot down if you could flip that one.

Preet Bharara:

Will we know, in all likelihood, who has won the election on election night?

Steve Kornacki:

It’s possible, but there are a lot of things that prolong the result in 2020 that have not changed in 2024. And the three states where I think that’s the most pronounced in would be Arizona, Nevada, and Pennsylvania. If Arizona and Nevada are reasonably competitive, it’s almost necessarily going to take till later in the week or the weekend to get those states called. It’s just the way these elections are administered there’s going to be a big, big pile up of ballots that it takes them days to process.

Pennsylvania is one where I’m not quite sure what to think. Obviously it took till Saturday after the election last time around. The reason it did was they introduced a vote by mail, obviously a COVID thing in 2020, and they were just overwhelmed with these ballots. What made it really difficult for Pennsylvania in 2020 was they couldn’t, the counties and the vote sites by law could not begin processing the mail of ballots until 7:00 A.M. on election day.

And processing, I mean, it’s a process. You had to open the envelope, match signatures. It takes a long time, it’s cumbersome. Now in 2024, that law has not changed. So that’s why there’s the potential, I think, for Pennsylvania to go real long again, but balance it with, I suspect we won’t have the same scale of vote by mail this time around as we did in ’20. And these counties, again, procedurally, their hands are tied, but they also, they do know a little bit more about I think, how to handle this. So that may speed things up too, but that processing, a lot of other states they can spend weeks before the election processing these mail-in ballots so that come election day, they treat them like any other ballot. They just stick them in the machine, they vote, they count them up and spit them out, and it takes a couple minutes. Not so in Pennsylvania.

Preet Bharara:

I’ve been assuming that if Donald Trump wins the presidency again, that that’s the universe in which he will also get the Senate to be Republican. Is that fair?

Steve Kornacki:

Yeah. I think it’s hard to see how that wouldn’t be the case.

Preet Bharara:

Okay. What about the other way around? If Kamala Harris wins the presidency, not a done deal for the Senate with the Democrats, or yes?

Steve Kornacki:

It’s unlikely because the simple math is if the Democrats lose two out of West Virginia, which everyone assumes is already gone for them, Montana and Ohio, barring a surprise loss somewhere else, the Republicans are at 51.

Preet Bharara:

So Democrats are probably going to win Ohio, am I right?

Steve Kornacki:

Oh, I… Here’s the thing that-

Preet Bharara:

Steve, Steve, Steve, come on.

Steve Kornacki:

What Democrats are up against.

Preet Bharara:

I get 10 emails a day from Sherrod Brown. Surely, surely-

Steve Kornacki:

Only 10?

Preet Bharara:

Yeah. Well, not counting texts.

Steve Kornacki:

In 2016 and 2020, the two previous times Trump was on the ballot, there’s a grand total of one single state where the vote for president and the vote for Senate diverged by party, and that was Maine in 2020, Susan Collins, Republican wins, Joe Biden wins the state. And the fear for Democrats is that they’ve got some Senate candidates right now who are looking pretty good, even in states that are overall very competitive at the presidential level, or Harris is even leading in some polls on the presidential level.

The fear for Democrats though is that ’16 and ’20 told us these things ultimately sync up. That voters ultimately get to the polls, and if they’re voting for Trump, they’re voting Republican. If they’re voting for Harris, they’re voting Democratic down the line. And to these advantages that these Democratic Senate candidates, somebody like Sherrod Brown who’s certainly outpacing Trump in Ohio, but his victory requires necessarily a significant number of Trump voters to vote Democratic for Senate. Does that disappear when people actually get the ballot? That’s the sort of the wild card there and elsewhere.

Preet Bharara:

I just want to point out for the record that as you were speaking, I looked at my laptop and I got a notification of an email from Sherrod Brown. We summoned it. I was going to read it aloud, but we don’t have the time. But everyone, if you’re listening and you’re a Democrat, please support Sherrod Brown, get more people to the polls on your side in Ohio. Do you spend time thinking of, or is it useless exercise, but do you spend time thinking of what a reasonable scenario is that will unfold, given the best information you have about where each state is, or is that an impossibility?

Steve Kornacki:

Sort of gaming out election night, you mean?

Preet Bharara:

Yeah.

Steve Kornacki:

Yeah, we actually have-

Preet Bharara:

Like a plausible, what’s… Putting all the hand wringing aside and over-Confidence aside, what’s a plausible scenario for Kamala Harris? What’s a plausible scenario for Donald Trump?

Steve Kornacki:

Most plausible scenario for Kamala Harris is just something I think that involves massive suburban turnout, further Democratic gains in the suburbs, and they made substantial gains last time around. And a Trump scenario I think involves minimizing the suburban bleeding, and realizing the kinds of gains among non-white voters, Hispanic voters largely, but also black voters, black male voters, that’s where you see a little bit in the polls. Actually realizing those on election day.

And Pennsylvania is a real interesting state, as good as any, because those suburbs right outside Philadelphia, I’m going to look at Chester County in particular. There’s no county in Pennsylvania that’s become more Democratic in the Trump era than Chester County. Is Harris getting an even bigger number there than Biden got in 2020, and what does the turnout look like? And there’s a string of small cities, mid-size cities throughout Eastern Pennsylvania, some call it the Latino belt, cities like Hazelton and Allentown and Redding, where if the Trump gains with Hispanic voters are real, he’s going to dramatically reduce what’s been a pretty big democratic advantage in a lot of those places. And that would counter Democratic gains in the suburbs. So those are both of those things happening, is one happening more than the other, is one not happening? Those are some of the places I’d look for and things I’d look for.

Preet Bharara:

On election night, November 5th. What is the ballpark figure that reflects the number of hours of sleep you’ll get that night? Is it an above-zero number, or not?

Steve Kornacki:

Oh, it’s zero.

Preet Bharara:

It’s zero.

Steve Kornacki:

Because I can almost-

Preet Bharara:

So what do you do? Do you carbo load? Do you drink a lot of coffee the night… What’s your training regimen for election night?

Steve Kornacki:

Election night is not tough. If I got to go around around the clock on election night, and I fully expect that the pattern on this is Wisconsin will, I’m guessing, will come down to the city of Milwaukee, which counts its absentee vote. That would be the mail-in vote, the early vote on its own. It generally gets released 3, 4, 5 in the morning, and in two straight elections that’s where the election’s been decided when that comes out. So I suspect Wisconsin will be called somewhere in that window, and that could be decisive for the presidential election. So I’m planning to be up overnight election night and for it to be pretty dramatic, and the drama unfolding keeps me awake. It’s more when we get into four or five days, that’s when I start to feel it.

Preet Bharara:

Do you sleep like 10 hours on November 4th?

Steve Kornacki:

I left, in 2020 we called the election 11:38 AM, and I was on a little bit of a high after because it’s just, what a week it’s been, all this stuff. But I got home and I closed my eyes about 6:30 that night, and I woke up at 11:30 the next morning.

Preet Bharara:

Oh my gosh. Wow. Like college again.

Steve Kornacki:

It’s the longest I’ve ever slept, I think in my life.

Preet Bharara:

Did executives from NBC come and try to rouse you?

Steve Kornacki:

I know I gave them strict orders not to call me.

Preet Bharara:

Okay. Do not rouse. Steve Kornacki, it’s been a real delight to have you. We’ll be watching your coverage. Thanks so much and see you soon.

Steve Kornacki:

Really enjoyed it. Thank you.

Preet Bharara:

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If you like what we do, rate and review the show on Apple Podcasts or wherever you listen. Every positive review helps new listeners find the show. Send me your questions about news, politics, and justice. Tweet them to me at @PreetBharara with the hashtag #AskPreet. You can also now reach me on Threads, or you can call and leave me a message at 669-247-7338. That’s 669-24-PREET. Or you can send an email to letters@cafe.com.

Stay Tuned is presented by CAFE and the Vox Media Podcast Network. The executive producer is Tamara Sepper. The technical director is David Tatasciore. The deputy editor is Celine Rohr. The editorial producers are Noa Azulai and Jake Kaplan. The associate producer is Claudia Hernández, and the CAFE team is Matthew Billy, Nat Weiner, and Liana Greenway. Our music is by Andrew Dost. I’m your host, Preet Bharara. As always, Stay Tuned.