After the polls close in California on Tuesday, NBC News data analyst Steve Kornacki will just be getting started.<\/p>\n
Since December, the khacki-clad vote-counting guru has been going live and uninterrupted on streaming platforms to provide results and analysis of every special election and even some state Senate contests.<\/p>\n
The stream \u2014 called the Kornacki Cam \u2014 provides unadulterated number-crunching without any pundits weighing in. Rather than getting updates that last a few minutes, Kornacki provides continuous real time results until the last available total is counted.<\/p>\n
\u201cThis all happens in full view,\u201d Kornacki said Monday in a phone interview. \u201cThe audience gets to see the whole thing. They get to see the buildup, the anticipation, the payoff.\u201d<\/p>\n
In the 10 Kornacki Cam sessions streamed by NBC News so far, 20 million viewers have sampled on YouTube alone. The coverage \u2014 consisting of Kornacki, his Big Board, his producer and a Stedicam operator \u2014 is also available on NBCNews.com, the NBC News app and the division\u2019s social media accounts on Instagram, Facebook and TikTok.<\/p>\n
The Kornacki Cam will focus on the primaries for Los Angeles mayor, California and several Congressional districts, shortly after the state\u2019s polls close at 8 p.m. Pacific. <\/p>\n
In a Monday chat with The Times, here are the trends Kornacki says he\u2019ll be looking for on the night.<\/p>\n
Polling in mayoral races is typically pretty unreliable. What do you make of the contest based on what you\u2019ve seen?<\/p>\n
You don\u2019t always have super-competitive mayoral elections and they\u2019re not all created equal. It\u2019s not quite like a presidential election so you just don\u2019t have a wealth of data to draw on for expectations either.<\/p>\n
I\u2019ve seen the polling you\u2019ve seen. It suggests that of the three candidates, (Mayor Karen Bass, reality TV star Spencer Pratt and City Council member Nithya Raman) Bass is in the best position to get into the runoff. It also suggests that Spencer Pratt has had the most positive movement in the last month or so of the campaign. But we go in knowing there will be volatility and I\u2019m open to any and all possibilities.<\/p>\n
Spencer Pratt is an unusual candidate who has been able to take up a lot of oxygen in the race. Is there a hidden vote for him that people might not be eager to admit to pollsters?<\/p>\n
You can look at the city and know where to look for whether Pratt is having a big night. The San Fernando Valley is gonna be more than a third of the vote, probably close to 40%. If he gets in the general election, he wants to be winning there by a big margin. \u2029If it\u2019s not happening there for Pratt, I don\u2019t think it\u2019s happening anywhere else. Karen Bass is going to rely on central and south L.A., with probably a third of the vote coming out of those two places. Those should be her bulwarks. The Westside, I think could be more of a toss-up. There\u2019s a fair chunk of the vote there.<\/p>\n
We don\u2019t do a ton of mayoral races around the country. So we\u2019re still trying to figure out exactly how detailed we\u2019re going to be able to zoom in, at the neighborhood level and the precinct level. <\/p>\n
Turnouts usually are low for Los Angeles mayoral races. Will this year be different?<\/p>\n
This mayoral race has received a lot more national attention than 2022. \u2029So my thought is that the turnout would be higher, just based on that. But this is something that is resonating nationally because Pratt has that celebrity factor. The number was 646,000 (total votes) for 2022. So that\u2019s something we\u2019ll be following \u2014 are we trending over or under that?<\/p>\n
And what will be the best indicators for the gubernatorial race?<\/p>\n
The place that I kind of got circled here is Orange County. In the last two sort of major statewide elections, it was the first to report out vote. \u2029At 8:06 p.m local time in California, in 2024, Orange County reported out half of its vote, right? So you\u2019re getting, you know, you\u2019re getting hundreds of thousands of votes, potentially, from this enormous county within, potentially within 10 minutes of polls closing. \u2029There were a couple others \u2014 the Central Valley, and we got a we got a good chunk of Merced and Fresno quickly. <\/p>\n
So how long are we going to have to wait for a result on Tuesday night?<\/p>\n
One of the other things that just surrounds everything in California, whether it\u2019s the mayor\u2019s race, or governor\u2019s race, or anything else, is nothing is definitive in the first hour or so after the polls close. We\u2019re probably realistically looking at a days or even weeks-long process of getting all the vote counted.<\/p>\n
I know it drives many people nuts. Without editorializing on that, it\u2019s just a fact that they can get out of about two-thirds of their vote on election night, and if the races aren\u2019t clear and definitive, then you\u2019re generally in for a pretty long haul.<\/p>\n
We do know in California that they\u2019re not going (to count) nonstop until they get a result. They\u2019re going to then start doing updates as they process and count the remaining vote by mail, which is usually a considerable pile in a lot of these places. The vote by mail in California can continue coming in for seven days after the election.<\/p>\n
So do you think your coverage reflects a shift in what the consumer wants? We already know how fragmented the audience is. Are there now enough political junkies who want the pure uncut stuff? <\/p>\n
I\u2019ve been doing this about 20 years, and when I would tell people that I reported on politics for a living, they either moved away from me or changed the subject. And now, you know, I found the last, you know, 10 years or something, has just totally changed. People come up to me, even if they don\u2019t know I work in politics, and they want to talk politics. Everybody seems into it whatever side they\u2019re on.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"After the polls close in California on Tuesday, NBC News data analyst Steve Kornacki will just be getting…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":342126,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[7,92701,9,8,14999,140848,63,79871,1024,22832,1869,592,1410,8111,13824,43125,4486],"class_list":["post-342125","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-california","tag-california","tag-california-gubernatorial-race","tag-california-headlines","tag-california-news","tag-few-minute","tag-kornacki-cam","tag-los-angeles-times","tag-mayoral-race","tag-monday","tag-nbc-news","tag-night","tag-people","tag-place","tag-poll","tag-result","tag-spencer-pratt","tag-vote"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/342125","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=342125"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/342125\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/342126"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=342125"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=342125"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=342125"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}