As NBC News prepares to kick off its 2026 midterm election coverage Tuesday with the Democratic and Republican primaries in Texas, North Carolina and Arkansas viewers will get a taste of what the network has in store for the rest of the year. And it involves a whole lot of chief data analyst Steve Kornacki, on every platform.
The NBC News data analyst will get an expanded “Kornacki Cam” for 2026, and this year’s edition will stream everywhere people are already consuming news content: On NBC News’ digital platforms, plus YouTube, TikTok and Instagram, all complementing NBC’s main coverage.
“It’s liberating,” Kornacki tells The Hollywood Reporter in an interview of the expaned streaming strategy. “I think typically on an election night, there’s a certain bar that I would have to reach with the election returns to get the producer’s attention, to get me on the air with the result. Doing it this way, on this livestream, there is no bar. Every result makes air. Every county result makes air. Every little twist and turn makes air.”
NBC News, in fact, is betting that the Kornacki Cam can be a media trust-builder at a time when media trust is at an all-time low.
“We are very hopeful that this is something that can help restore trust by being more transparent,” says NBC News president of editorial Rebecca Blumenstein, adding that letting viewers peek behind the curtain may help them better understand how NBC does what it does. “Steve is sitting there at the big board, he’s getting the signal from the decision desk that the result is coming in. … He’s giving it to viewers and readers as it’s happening, and then he’s tabulating the results of one county versus another and what’s going to happen.”
NBC tested out the new Kornacki cam back in December for a special election in Tennessee, garnering more than 1.5 million views, surprisingly large numbers for a one-off special election. Kornacki says they experimented in that stream, embracing the “behind the scenes” impact: While he was analyzing the results for the streaming audience, he would also tell them when he was about to go live on NBC News Now or the broadcast feed.
“I’ll be talking to that sort of hardcore election audience on the live stream, and then I will tell them, ‘OK, guys, hang on a second, pause here for 10 seconds, they’re going to, you know, route me into the News Now broadcast, and I’m going to talk to the news now for two minutes, I’m going to say some things you’ve already heard me say, but just bear with me here, because we want to update the rest of the country on what we’ve been talking about here,’” Kornacki says. “And then I’ll go and I’ll do two minutes on News Now, talking a little bit more broadly, a little bit more generally, about the headlines that we’ve seen in the results, and then we’ll go back to the livestream audience.”
“We feel that with him now showing up on the Kornacki Cam in a new, expanded way, we can really bring our audiences more Kornacki and show show them really what the process is, and how Steve synthesizes results and data,” Blumenstein says.
And for Kornacki, it means that data nerds and political junkies can get their fix, while the watching the results on TV, or wherever they happen to be, on primary nights and election nights throughout the year, leading up to November.
“Here’s a chance to just do the results start to stop, from the first precinct reporting until the race is called, to be able to show the viewers and take the viewers on that journey that I’ve been taking every election night, and I’ve been able to share parts of it with them. Now, I can share the whole thing,” Kornacki says. “Now, every time I see something come in, a new result come in from from a county or from a certain part of the state, I can show it right away. I can talk about it. And I think the viewer has the opportunity to get a much more kind of comprehensive picture of how the election was won or lost.”
And in a news environment filled to the brim with pundits, Kornacki just explains it like it is:
“With Steve, there’s almost zero punditry, he’s able to break down data real time in a way that no one else can,” Blumenstein says.
Now viewers can come along for that ride.
Credit: Source link