Steve Kornacki Reacts to Fan Merch and Talks Trump vs. Biden 2024 Election | The Tonight Show

-I appreciate you coming back to the show here. -Thanks for having me. -You don't really get much applause in your job. You don't have a live audience. -We have nobody watching. -Yeah, you should -- -Makes it a lot less stressful. I can tell ya. -Yeah, yeah. Uh, you know, you have giant fans, rabid fans. People love Steve Kornacki. Yeah. [ Cheers and applause ] And fans have created stuff -- like, merch, like, swag. Steve Kornacki merch online. And I'm gonna show you a couple things. I don't kno

w if -- You have no connection to any of this, right? -I wish I was making some money. -No, no. You're not. No. No. These are just fans. This one is a -- is a shirt that I got. It says, uh -- "Kornacki. Chart Throb." [ Cheers and applause ] I thought that was a good one. A Chart Throb. Never heard of that before. -No. Same. -That was a good one. A Chart Throb. Then I saw this mug I thought was pretty cool. Look at this one here. It says... "Map Daddy." [ Laughter ] That's pretty good. You can ha

ve that one, actually. -Thank you. -Yeah. This is your water. So you can... You can -- You can have Map Daddy. Yeah. Yeah. This is gonna be meta if you drink out of that. And then I saw this one. I'm keeping this one. This Steve Kornacki pillow. And I... -Gosh. [ Cheers and applause ] That's disturbing. -Uh, you've been nice enough to come on the show. We've done some bits and talked about a lot of stuff together, but, uh -- And, actually, I think I even raided your office at one point and came

in because you just never leave the office. But we were talking about this phenomenon. It was the last election. Uh, you wear kind of -- You wear khaki pants and a white shirt, uh, basically is what you were wearing. And this is true. "Steve Kornacki's election night outfit sparks surge in khaki sales." You actually spiked the needle on khakis. Because of you. -Yeah. It's -- Again, I wish I had a cut of the profits, but -- Nothing. -You didn't have a deal with Gap? -I wish I did. All this money

I could have been making. -Yeah, you could have been making -- I don't know how many Map Daddy mugs we can sell, but, hey, NBC store, I mean, might as well do it. But that's wild. Do you think about your outfit when you... -No. The level of thought I put into that versus, like, the attention it apparently got was -- Believe it or not, I'm not, like, a fashion person usually. So I was like -- -I don't believe it. -I was in the office on Election Day. I'm just getting ready for, you know -- We're

studying each state and the counties and all that stuff, and I just had those pants on for whatever -- Comfortable. I put them on in the morning. And then it's like 15 minutes to air. And I'm like, "Well, I don't have time to get changed into anything fancy." And it was the middle of COVID, so there was, like, no adult supervision. I was like, "Nobody's gonna tell me..." So I just -- I threw a dress shirt on and I went on air. And then like two days later, we were on the air for like 48 hours in

a row. My producer's like, "We got this magazine asking what brand the pants are." It's like, what the... Our culture's broken. I don't know. -Uh, well, I have two big questions going into this election. First, how do you see this all shaking out? And, two, will the Kornacki Cam be back? -I mean, the election. I mean, it's, like, a cop-out to say, but it's 50/50. -Really? -Yeah. I mean, in 2020, you kind of felt the whole way that Biden had the advantage over Trump. It ended up being very close

, but I think there was a lot of indications Biden had an edge in 2020. And when I look at the same data now, it's a very different dynamic. So this race is -- You can make a case for Biden, and it's basically a case against Trump. And you can make a case for Trump, and it's basically a case against Biden. It's whose negatives are going to end up being higher, I think, is what's going to drive it. And it's a tough one to measure. -Yeah. And do people get swayed? Are the polls changing? First of

all, I don't even know. Like, who does the polls? -Well, I mean, our own poll, it's interesting. -Like, who takes these polls? -NBC's got a great team. -I've never taken a poll. No one's ever asked me anything. I've never -- And if they did, I would say, "Leave me alone. I don't want to answer this." -You know, that is... [ Applause ] -...doing these polls... -That's the toughest thing in polling right now. People see, they pick up their cellphone. They don't recognize the number. What do they d

o? They send it to the voicemail. If they even have a landline, they assume it's a sales call. So it takes more and more calls to get people on the phone. But the one thing that people agree on in polling on this election right now is you say, "Do you wish the choice was not Biden and Trump?" And overwhelmingly they say yes. And, yet, that's what we're going to get. [ Cheers and applause ] -Who else is in the field? I mean, Nikki Haley is still -- She's not dropped out of the race. -Yeah. -What

would it take for Nikki Haley to be a viable candidate? -She'd have to do something she hasn't done yet. Win. And it sounds flip, but she's running in South Carolina. It's her home state. She was the governor for two terms. And she's 30 points behind in the polls there. And unless she -- That's going to be in a couple of weeks. Unless she finds some way to win that state, I don't know how you can go forward. If you lose your home state and you lose it badly and you've lost everything before it,

I don't know what the case is at that point. -And she just drops out, you think, after that if she can't. -It's hard to see a path after that, you know? What she decides to do, I don't know, but it's hard to see how she could possibly win if she can't win her home state. -Has it ever been done? Has there ever been an election like this where the president lost and then was re-running again? -Yeah, we got a great president from 1892. Uh, Grover Cleveland. -Is that right? -The old -- The old Benja

min Harrison, Grover Cleveland election. It's the great trivia question. The only president to have nonconsecutive terms. It was Grover Cleveland. 1884, he won. He lost to Benjamin Harrison in 1888. He got a rematch in 1892, and he won. And that's the last time we've had a dynamic like that. And it looks like we're gonna have it now. -Are you prepared for going crazy? -[ Laughs ] Yeah. I'm always ready for that. I got plenty of caffeine. We got numbers coming in on Election Night from all direct

ions, counties all over America. -You got your khakis ready? -I guess I have to, you know? This time, I got to get a deal for them, you know? -Yeah, you got to -- Yeah, exactly. I was thinking -- We'll call the Gap. -Yeah. -But how long were you up? You really were up, like, 40 something hours. -I think we -- We went back and looked, and it was 45 straight at one point that week in 2020. -Did you know that or did you go like, "Hey..." -No. -You didn't? -No. I mean, it was just like -- It was all

a blur. Um, and then at one point, you know, I realized, "Wow. It's been a while since I slept." And then I realized it was like -- I don't want to fall asleep. So, we do these segments when we get new vote returns, and then they go back to the desk and they wait for me to get new returns. And the key was, don't sit down. Because if you sit down, you fall asleep right away. So I stayed standing, too, for all that time. -I can't thank you enough for all the work that you do. You're a great guy.

You're a smart man. And we appreciate this. And if you are not registered to vote, by the way, go to vote.gov and register to vote because election season's coming. Thank you very much. Come back. -Thank you. -Steve Kornacki, everybody. Check out his election coverage on NBC News and MSNBC. We'll be right back with a performance from Sophie Ellis-Bextor. Stick around!