Steve Kornacki
Appearances
Apple News Today
How Trump’s DEI crackdown is impacting women in science
in the last couple of years, in special elections for the House and in lower turnout elections, not like presidential elections where everybody votes, that's where the Democrats have had an advantage. That's where they've overperformed. They've done well. Why?
Apple News Today
How Trump’s DEI crackdown is impacting women in science
Because it seems that the Democratic base for elections that do not have Donald Trump on the ballot seems more motivated than the Republican base. That was the story going right into the 24 election. Didn't turn out to be a thing in November, but it may still very much be a thing in special elections. That's something we could find out on Tuesday.
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Election Night Cheat Sheet (feat. Steve Kornacki)
Now, you're talking about a more significant Latino voting population than like in North Carolina. So you're starting to really see it here. You look in Philadelphia, first of all, Democrats obviously depend on massive pluralities and turnout from Philadelphia. So you want to see if you can get a sense of the turnout early.
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Election Night Cheat Sheet (feat. Steve Kornacki)
But also, you saw in 2020 in Philadelphia, progress for Trump in working class, majority Hispanic areas. I'm not But he did actually, while losing ground in Pennsylvania as a whole, he actually improved in the city of Philadelphia, which is Philadelphia County. So you want to see that.
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Election Night Cheat Sheet (feat. Steve Kornacki)
And then you want to see, again, for the Latino vote in Pennsylvania, another area that Trump folks have targeted for growth is you can call it the Route 222 corridor. Some people have called it the Latino belt. But you've got this sort of like network of small, mid-sized cities with large and really fast-growing Hispanic populations. You know, Allentown, Redding, Hazleton.
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Election Night Cheat Sheet (feat. Steve Kornacki)
Hazleton, it's a small city, but, you know, turn of the century, it was 5% Latino. Now it's almost 70% Latino. These are places where if you looked inside the cities... Trump made gains of 10, 15 points, net points in 2020, even as he lost the state.
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Election Night Cheat Sheet (feat. Steve Kornacki)
So this is where his campaign, you know, the way they've been talking about this, if that's happening, this is where you're going to see it dramatically. So look there, you know, and look, you want to look at the collar counties, you know, this is where the Democrats, Chester County is in the Trump era.
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Election Night Cheat Sheet (feat. Steve Kornacki)
There's no county in Pennsylvania that has moved more in the Democrats direction than Chester, you know, high college educated concentration right outside Philadelphia. You know, is like his hair is cracking 60% there. They want to keep growing there. And then the one, you know, Bucks is a big swing county there. And the other one I really want to look at is Lackawanna, Scranton.
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Election Night Cheat Sheet (feat. Steve Kornacki)
It's interesting because it's very classic for the sort of Midwest region, whatever you want to call it. I know nobody up there would say they're in the Midwest, but Obama won it by 28 in 2012, came all the way down to three for Hillary Clinton in 2016. Biden comes along and he brought it back up to nine. And it's interesting because Scranton is where he's from originally.
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Election Night Cheat Sheet (feat. Steve Kornacki)
Was there a local effect for Biden that produced that or was there something else? Is Trump able to bring that back down and maybe even flip that county? I'm paying close attention there.
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Election Night Cheat Sheet (feat. Steve Kornacki)
Yeah, I mean, I'm sort of cautiously optimistic it's going to be quicker, maybe significantly quicker. The main difference is just the volume of vote by mail this time around. It's down dramatically. That's what really clogged it up in 2020 in some of these states. Plus, some have changed their procedures to make it even better.
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Election Night Cheat Sheet (feat. Steve Kornacki)
Yeah, of the 67 counties in Pennsylvania, there are 10 that have actually, you know, gotten more Democratic, you know, since 2012. And I, obviously, as a whole, Democrats are doing worse in Pennsylvania than they were when Obama ran in 12. But there's 10 counties where they've actually gotten even better than they did under Obama. And, you know, Montgomery-
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Election Night Cheat Sheet (feat. Steve Kornacki)
chester delaware these you know collar counties right outside what you're talking about these big suburban counties right outside philly a little bit of a sleeper one south central pennsylvania is cumberland county where carlisle is there's actually been democratic growth in that area it has a lot of these demographic characteristics you know and you go out allegheny county you think pittsburgh it's 1.2 million people there's a lot of inner suburbs
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Election Night Cheat Sheet (feat. Steve Kornacki)
Within Allegheny County that, again, fit this demographic profile that's been so rich for Democrats. So, yeah, I mean, a place like Chester County, an easy benchmark to start with is she is she over 60 percent, you know, because Biden was able to get it up to the high 50s. Could she crack 60 percent there? That starts to get into, you know, I think an encouraging territory for her.
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Election Night Cheat Sheet (feat. Steve Kornacki)
Yeah, I mean, so Wayne County is going to cover a lot of the uncertainty you're talking about. That's where Dearborn, Dearborn Heights, you know, Hamtramck, you have cities with large Muslim American, large Arab American populations. The way they do the vote counting in Michigan, they do it by, you know, at the municipal level.
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Election Night Cheat Sheet (feat. Steve Kornacki)
So I think we should be able to have access to some of those individual results, hopefully early, that could start answering that. Also in Wayne, obviously, that's where Detroit is. Detroit, same story, really, as Philadelphia. As a city, Trump actually made a little bit of progress there in 2020.
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Election Night Cheat Sheet (feat. Steve Kornacki)
That's a place where is Trump gaining, as you're saying, small but meaningful support with black voters, particularly black men and Republicans. what's the turnout level in Detroit? What's the turnout level among black voters in Detroit? Because you look at it, Biden was able to win Wayne County 68 to 30 last time around. When you start playing with the numbers, if it just went to 64, 34,
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Election Night Cheat Sheet (feat. Steve Kornacki)
That's, in terms of raw votes, because Wayne County, it's 25% of the state, just that one county. So that's going to move massive raw votes.
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Election Night Cheat Sheet (feat. Steve Kornacki)
And then the other quick test I have in that region, because you got Wayne, you got Washtenaw, where University of Michigan is, and then you got the two big suburban counties, Oakland, higher income, high college plus suburb, Macomb, blue collar auto industry suburbs. And measure Macomb against Oakland. This is one of the tests I'm going to do. In 16, when Trump won Michigan by a sliver,
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Election Night Cheat Sheet (feat. Steve Kornacki)
McComb, his support of McComb, he won it by 12, almost completely canceled out Hillary's support in Oakland, which she won by eight. Basically canceled these other out. In 20, when Biden won, Biden won Oakland by 14 and Trump only won McComb by eight. And there was actually a net difference of 70,000 votes in the Democrats' favor. And they won the state by 154,000. So almost half
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Election Night Cheat Sheet (feat. Steve Kornacki)
just came from that disparity. So, I mean, I want to know, are we looking at a tiny, insignificant disparity between them, or is it netting out in the Democrats' favor like it did four years ago?
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Election Night Cheat Sheet (feat. Steve Kornacki)
others that haven't even changed the procedures at least they have more experience with it now a couple elections under their belt so yeah i remind people you go back one election further 2016 it was it was a close election you know it was a couple states by you know about 50 000 votes 75 000 votes we had the verdict by 1 30 in the morning i would say that is a verdict i remember quite well when that came down as you can imagine
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Election Night Cheat Sheet (feat. Steve Kornacki)
Yeah, no, I mean, exactly. It's geographically Wisconsin. Just if you paint the map is very red right now. The Democratic support, as we see in so many places, increasingly geographically concentrated. They just keep squeezing more and more out of Dane County every election. I think every election this century, the Democratic plurality in Dane has grown.
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Election Night Cheat Sheet (feat. Steve Kornacki)
There's a test right there because they increasingly need it to compensate for these losses they've taken everywhere else in the state. Milwaukee, again, very similar to what we talked about with Detroit and Philadelphia. You know, Trump showed a little bit of signs of inroads there in 2020. Are we seeing more of that or not?
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Election Night Cheat Sheet (feat. Steve Kornacki)
Of the three wow counties around Milwaukee, Ozaukee is the one that I'm most interested in because it's moved the most dramatically away from the Republicans. It was 55-43 for Trump in 2020. That was the best performance for a Democrat there since LBJ in 64. It has the second highest concentration of white college educated voters of anywhere in Wisconsin. Second to Dane.
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Election Night Cheat Sheet (feat. Steve Kornacki)
You know, Harris is threatening to win a place like Ozaukee County. And then we say, wow. I like to say bow wow, because you've got Brown.
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Election Night Cheat Sheet (feat. Steve Kornacki)
out of gamey in winnebago counties fox river valley and they all tell the exact same story this is green bay appleton oshkosh and they tell the exact same story trump got up to about a you know 10 12 point win in 2016 in these counties and then he gave back some of those games not all but some and he lost them by you know mid-high single digits and so is he back at 16 levels in the bow counties or is he still back in the single digits because he needs to get back to where he was there
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Election Night Cheat Sheet (feat. Steve Kornacki)
Yeah, I mean, it's a Maricopa County. It's a little bit more than 60 percent is going to come out of there. And then south of that, you got Pima or Tucson is another 15 percent is going to come out of there. So more than three out of four votes coming from those two counties, unfortunately, with Maricopa. We can break it down by congressional district.
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Election Night Cheat Sheet (feat. Steve Kornacki)
So I was mentioning earlier the first congressional district that Dave Schweikert seat. I think that's we want to key in on that one, you know, kind of right away. The other question, though, in Arizona, too, is it's the Hispanic vote, because, again, it's. By exit polling in 2020, Biden carried the Hispanic vote in Arizona by 24 points, 61 to 37.
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Election Night Cheat Sheet (feat. Steve Kornacki)
You know, I pay attention to the polls that come out there and the Hispanic numbers, it's all over the place. There was one that had Trump up seven with Hispanic voters in Arizona recently. I think it was the CNN one this week had Harris up 18.
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Election Night Cheat Sheet (feat. Steve Kornacki)
But that's where, you know, again, given how tight the margin was in 2020, even a relatively small gain with Hispanic voters could erase for Trump, you know, that gap.
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Election Night Cheat Sheet (feat. Steve Kornacki)
Yeah. I mean, look, once you take West Virginia officially, you know, off the table and the Yeah, you know, Ohio should be a pretty efficient vote counting state. So you'll know kind of Sherrod Brown there. And then if Brown doesn't hang on, I mean, you'll have to test her later. But if Brown, you know, doesn't hang on, then Democrats have to pull a rabbit out of the hat somewhere.
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Election Night Cheat Sheet (feat. Steve Kornacki)
It'll be clear if there's any chance for them to do that in Texas, I think, pretty early on. And then there's that wild card in Nebraska. I know not technically a Democrat, all of this stuff. But again, barring something like that, you know, if Ohio is a four or five point win or something for, you know, for the Republicans, you'll know that on election night. Yeah.
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Election Night Cheat Sheet (feat. Steve Kornacki)
Well, yeah, they're coming in for a while. They're very slow at counting it. And it's another conversation. But yeah, for the House, it could be election month if we're waiting on them.
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Election Night Cheat Sheet (feat. Steve Kornacki)
Hey, thanks a lot, Dan. This was fun.
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Election Night Cheat Sheet (feat. Steve Kornacki)
Yeah, I'm sort of at the point where I don't think it's going to change dramatically. I don't know if I'd even trust it if a bunch of polls suddenly showed some kind of movement. And, you know, my overall thing here the last two months really has been I just don't trust confidence, you know, period.
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Election Night Cheat Sheet (feat. Steve Kornacki)
The more confidently somebody is asserting they see something in the polls or the early vote, the more skeptical I become.
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Election Night Cheat Sheet (feat. Steve Kornacki)
Well, yeah, it's one of those cautiously optimistic things again. But there is an argument that the fact that they're so close right now across the board, Trump is running at a higher number than he polled at in the past. And the race is closer than it ever was in the polling in 16 and 20. Is that the sign that the Trump voters who were missed in 16 and 20 are now being accounted for?
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Election Night Cheat Sheet (feat. Steve Kornacki)
Whether that's because of methodological changes from pollsters, did it self-correct? Was the big miss in 2020 more the product of just the weirdness of COVID, the pandemic? Did that somehow... So, I mean, that's one way to look at it.
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Election Night Cheat Sheet (feat. Steve Kornacki)
But yeah, I mean, when it's happened two elections in a row, I don't discount the possibility that, again, the Trump vote's undercounted, maybe not by as much, but even by a little would make a huge difference. And poll misses do not always have to favor Republicans. We've seen it before the other way. And I'm very alert to that possibility, too.
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Election Night Cheat Sheet (feat. Steve Kornacki)
Yeah. I mean, like the big miss in 20, for instance, was Wisconsin. It was the worst of any swing state. The average was about eight and a half for Biden going into election day. Six tenths of one point was the final result. There was a famous, you know, ABC poll October 2020 in Wisconsin that had Biden up 17 points.
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Election Night Cheat Sheet (feat. Steve Kornacki)
You know, I mean, that's that's the scale of what we were talking about four years ago.
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Election Night Cheat Sheet (feat. Steve Kornacki)
So I'm going to look in a couple of places in Georgia. First is what I call the blue blob. And it's the Atlanta metro area. It's now nine counties in that core that Biden won by, you know, cumulatively like 37 points in 2020 accounts for more than 40 percent of the vote. statewide is just getting bluer and bluer every election. My question there is, I guess one of them is, is the blob expanding?
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Election Night Cheat Sheet (feat. Steve Kornacki)
There's one county in that area that's been moving pretty dramatically towards the Democrats, but just missed Fayette County the last time around. If the Democrats are flipping that this time around and expanding that blob, I think that's a sign because that's talking about enthusiasm in the suburbs.
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Election Night Cheat Sheet (feat. Steve Kornacki)
You know, one of the things Democrats are hoping for here, that would be a very good sign for them of that. Then I look further north, sort of the fringes of the Atlanta metro, two giant counties there, Cherokee County and Forsyth County. Cherokee, in fact, I think used to be one of the top plurality producing counties for Republicans anywhere in the country.
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Election Night Cheat Sheet (feat. Steve Kornacki)
It's just massive and has stayed heavily Republican. But you still see it there, you know, whereas Romney was winning that county by like 50 points back in 2012. In 2020, it was just under 40 for Trump. So I want to see the Trump people believe they've arrested that slide. They think it's a bunch of things. It's, you know, four years of Biden has changed attitudes there a bit.
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Election Night Cheat Sheet (feat. Steve Kornacki)
They think, you know, Trump has mended fences with Brian Kemp, who did very well in a place like Cherokee County. Is that true? Has Trump arrested the slide there? Has he clawed stuff back? That's what they're counting on. There's a whole swath of counties, many of them rural, many of them with significant black populations, where Democrats are hoping for higher turnout.
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Election Night Cheat Sheet (feat. Steve Kornacki)
You know, something they saw in a lot of cases with Raphael Warnock when he won his first runoff victory back at the start of 2021. So I want to see what's happening in those places, too. We tend to get the vote pretty late out of Atlanta. Is that right? Yeah. Yeah, Fulton, DeKalb, you know, and it's that's a wild card everywhere this year is just the sequence and how this is going to happen.
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Election Night Cheat Sheet (feat. Steve Kornacki)
So it's I think what we're going to get in in Georgia, though, early is more of the the pre-election day vote. Then we'll start getting the election date. We saw huge, huge disparities, obviously, in 2020, where the election day vote was so rapid. Republican friendly.
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Election Night Cheat Sheet (feat. Steve Kornacki)
The only I see from these early voting stats that we're seeing is clearly there's more interest from Republicans in voting early this time. Does that just mean we're going to look up and say, wow, there's a lot less Republicans voting on Election Day than last time?
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Election Night Cheat Sheet (feat. Steve Kornacki)
I mean, I see what you're seeing from him because I have the same attitude. You make the exception for him because it's so established to go back decades doing this in the state. And he has a great track record. But again, it's I think what hangs in my head here a little bit in Nevada and everywhere is just we're so tied into the patterns that we saw in 2020.
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Election Night Cheat Sheet (feat. Steve Kornacki)
And I just think when you talk about early vote and these different vote methods, I think there's
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Election Night Cheat Sheet (feat. Steve Kornacki)
volatility there in how you know how voters are going to you know make these choices and i think the fact of trump and the republicans deciding this time they want to embrace it so much coverage you know even in conservative media the last four years about wow this might have been a blown opportunity and so i just you know we may end up looking back at this and saying wow all everything was inverted this time you know in these patterns and so that's kind of in my head too
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Election Night Cheat Sheet (feat. Steve Kornacki)
And also the best, the sort of John Ralston of Arizona was also looking at it and looking at the turnout rates. What was interesting to me was if you look in Maricopa, which is pretty much the ballgame out there, close to it, it is the first congressional district. And that's one of the most competitive. That's Dave Schweikert, the Republican, who barely survived in 22.
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Election Night Cheat Sheet (feat. Steve Kornacki)
This is one of the races of the side of the house. This is the highest income area in Maricopa County, highest college degree concentration there. This is a place where Democrats think, you know, just demographically, based on some of those factors, they can make more progress this time.
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Election Night Cheat Sheet (feat. Steve Kornacki)
And the turnout levels there are significantly higher than elsewhere in Maricopa County, like the core city of Phoenix or Tempe or something like that. And what does that tell you, if anything? Well, then that's the question. How do you read it? Are those the types of Republican voters who are kind of turned off by Trump?
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Election Night Cheat Sheet (feat. Steve Kornacki)
Because demographically, that's where Trump has struggled among traditional Republicans. Or have they made peace with Trump and they're just, you know, they're ready to go? Yeah, I'm like you. That's why there's that sorcery we're talking about here.
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Election Night Cheat Sheet (feat. Steve Kornacki)
Yeah, I don't get the sense on the vote counting side. I guess there's been some reports that the little bit less participation in the Western North Carolina area. We were running the numbers of the other day. I didn't see a very big difference there. What I'm looking for mainly is a couple of things similar to Georgia, Eastern North Carolina.
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Election Night Cheat Sheet (feat. Steve Kornacki)
There's a swath of, you know, large black population, generally rural counties. Obama, you know, did very well there when he won a state. No way. That's the last time a Democrat carried it. Can Democrats kind of recapture that a bit? One thing they got to worry about there is the black populations have been declining in a lot of these counties, too.
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Election Night Cheat Sheet (feat. Steve Kornacki)
So it's not just a turnout question in some places. But I want to see if the Democrats are making meaningful gains there. And then I want to look at there's counties outside of the sort of big major metros just outside of in bedroom community counties down by Charlotte.
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Election Night Cheat Sheet (feat. Steve Kornacki)
Uh, you got Union County and similar to what I was describing with Cherokee and Georgia, um, big bedroom community suburbs, you know, a lot of, a lot of banking industry kind of, um, affiliations there went for, uh, Trump by 30 points in 2016, came down to 24 in 2020. Is he arresting the slide? Is he clawing it back?
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Election Night Cheat Sheet (feat. Steve Kornacki)
Similar just outside, uh, Wake County, you know, where Raleigh is, um, you know, the other big population hub, um, Johnston County, just outside of there, similar story. You know, I want to look at that. Nash County is right around there. That's one a lot of people are talking about.
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Election Night Cheat Sheet (feat. Steve Kornacki)
So in all these states, too, there's the question of you can't pinpoint a single county, but you've just got this like collection of North Carolina, dozens of counties, rural, small population counties where Trump has expanded the Republican support by leaps and bounds, even from where it was under Romney 12 years ago. Take those collectively. Is he continuing that trend or not?
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Election Night Cheat Sheet (feat. Steve Kornacki)
I'm going to cautiously look at Florida, which closes at 7 and reports very efficiently. Not for Miami-Dade, because Miami-Dade, Trump made huge gains there. Demographically, though, lots of Cuban-Americans. It's different than a lot of other heavily Latino areas. Where I'm going to look in Florida in particular is Osceola County, which is just south of Orlando.
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Election Night Cheat Sheet (feat. Steve Kornacki)
It's not too elaborate. The excitement of, you know, everything gets me easily through the night. I don't have to do, you know, anything artificial for that. I guess the big thing is I always I carve out like two hours in the middle of the afternoon to go take a walk. Just clear my head. You know, you get all those anecdotal turnout reports. They're useless. So, you know, just ignore it.
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Election Night Cheat Sheet (feat. Steve Kornacki)
It's one of three majority Hispanic counties in the state, and it's the one with the highest concentration of Puerto Rican voters. It's about one third Puerto Rican as a whole of the county. It's a big size county. Obviously, you want to see there if there's any evidence that the events of the last week have had any impact.
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Election Night Cheat Sheet (feat. Steve Kornacki)
But it's also notable because this showed that, you know, Trump's gains with Hispanic voters in 2020, Miami-Dade got all the attention. But again, because of the Cuban-American factor, I think Osceola was actually the more dramatic example of it. Trump gained 11 points. He lost it by 25, Osceola, the first time he ran, got it all the way down to 14 the next time out.
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Election Night Cheat Sheet (feat. Steve Kornacki)
It's one of his best improvements in any county in Florida. And that's exactly the kind of place that his campaign has felt they're going to make more gains in, big gains in, the kind of place where like You know, the way they've been talking, a Trump victory in that county, you know, would be something in the range of what they're thinking. So I want to see if that's happening there.
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Election Night Cheat Sheet (feat. Steve Kornacki)
I know Florida, you can't extrapolate as much as you used to, but I think that one might be more meaningful than Miami-Dade.
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Election Night Cheat Sheet (feat. Steve Kornacki)
It is state law within 30 minutes of poll close, they have to report out all the mail and early vote. Typically, that's like 65, 70% of the vote in a county. Everything but the, you know, sort of small panhandle part of the state, that's 90% of the state is going to do that. So by 730, you've got just about every county, you know, has lighted up one color or the other.
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Election Night Cheat Sheet (feat. Steve Kornacki)
And then they just add the same day to it. And that can be very quick. You can have full counties, you know, by eight o'clock.