On Oct. 7, the Office of Inclusive Excellence hosted political journalist Steve Kornacki to discuss “The Story Behind the Stats: Media, Data, and the Future of Political Coverage,” as part of the Critical Conversations series.
The presentation was moderated by Lisa Burns, professor of media studies.
Kornacki is a well renowned national political correspondent for NBC News and MSNBC. He is most prominently known for his knowledge regarding political history and his complex understanding of the electoral map. In addition to this, he is also known for his election coverage where he provides watchers with real time analysis regarding voting patterns, exit polls and election coverage.
Kornacki is a graduate of Boston University and began his early career working as a print journalist covering New Jersey politics. His work has appeared in both the New York Times and The Wall Street Journal.
“When I do events like this, I feel my age,” Kornacki said in a post-event interview with The Chronicle. “I try to think back sometimes to like what I would have wanted to hear or would have been useful for me to hear when I was where you are now.”
Kornacki is often reminded of how much the world has changed, and is always curious of how college students navigate the current world when speaking at colleges and universities.
The Critical Conversation series events are public for all students and focus on a variety of topics with experts in those fields.
“The critical conversation series is designed to foster an inclusive and intellectually stimulating environment,” said David Fryson, interim vice president of equity and inclusion. “It is also important to know that this impactful series is an opportunity to change in our small way, the current American Narrative.”
The series allows students the opportunity to educate themselves and gain knowledge and understanding on a wide variety of topics from a multitude of unique perspectives.
“It lets people get educated about certain political issues,” said Arden Hopper, a junior political science major. “And especially in an election year, it’s important that people know what’s going on.”
The discussion followed various topics on the current election season, as well as previous elections. Kornacki compared current and past election cycles.
In previous elections, Kornacki always had an idea of how the election would pan out. However with the unpredictability of this year’s election, the results are not as clear.
“Heading into this year, I think is more of an appreciation for the uncertainty,” Kornacki said. “As you approach election night, (there is) a lot more hesitation when you look at polling, when you look at models, when you look at just trying to gauge expectations of the election, I think I’ve approached it this time much more with questions in my head.”
Kornacki specifically highlighted Pennsylvania’s significance in the results of the election. He discussed a few of the important Collar counties and the expected trends among them. As well as the typical demographic found within them.
“So you’ve got these four kinds of collar counties outside of Philadelphia, and almost a quarter of the votes in the state are going to come out of those counties,” Kornacki said. “Democrats have been doing better and better there.”
He then delved into different demographics of voters. This data is analyzed on and subsequent to election night.
“You can find very specific demographic groups, socioeconomic groups are, you know, predominating a precinct or a collection of six precincts,” Kornacki said.
This data can then be used for post-election discussions, as well as for making predictions during later elections.
When discussing the different tools Kornacki uses to report on elections, he noted the importance of maps. Kornacki compared the map to a photo from a polaroid camera. The photo slowly appears just similarly to how the states gradually begin to light up.
“This sort of data gets big enough, the map fills in enough, the counties get colored in, enough that we can start to say something meaningful about the trajectory of race,” Kornacki said. “I think that the map watching it fills in one county at a time, seeing the patterns emerge there.”
Kornacki noted that people can analyze the map deeper than looking at a state as red or blue as whole. The states individually can be analyzed to dissect where exactly the majority of red or blue is in that given state, and how all of the counties differ.
The discussion later turned to the impact that social media has had on the election. Kornacki has seen these platforms to be tribalizing the election. He explained that people describe “red and blue as partisan concepts.”
“It’s less that they think of themselves as for team red or for team blue, they think of themselves as against team red and against team blue,” Kornacki said.
Kornacki also highlighted that a major change in recent years has been the increase in the interest of politics and that “voting has skyrocketed.”
The discussion was then opened up to the audience for a Q&A. A student in the audience questioned voter turnout.
“There aren’t many jobs like the one that I have,” Kornacki said in a post discussion interview with The Chronicle.
“I think there is no real path to what I’m doing and so I mainly just feel, you know, very fortunate that this sort of collection of different experiences that I had, I think they all helped me in some way. They all gave me some kind of knowledge and some kind of skill that I wouldn’t have had before.”
