Days before the midterm elections, political analyst Steve Kornacki briefly pivoted away from preparing to staff the NBC News “big board” maps for a different horse race: a literal one.
Kornacki, the Groton native who achieved star status as America’s “chartthrob” during the 2020 election and serves as chief data analyst for NBC News and NBC Sports, decamped this week to Lexington, Ky. to cover the Breeders’ Cup. In 2020, he energetically broke down days of vote-tallying in his signature Gap khaki pants, earning him a spot on People’s “Sexiest Men of 2020.”
Kornacki’s full-time move from MSNBC to NBC News since the last national election has expanded his excitable presence and data-driven analysis in elections and in the world of sports. But there’s a more personal side to Kornacki’s trip to Kentucky. He’ll be meeting there with Bob Catalini, a former school teacher turned racing journalist whom Kornacki credits with sparking his lifelong interest in politics.
The convergence of the two men’s work in recent years — Catalini helps run the digital thoroughbred racing outlet The Real Players Inside The Backstretch — has brought Kornacki back to a formative relationship that helped shape his distinctive approach to television coverage.
It all started in Catalini’s sixth-grade social studies class at Groton-Dunstable Regional Middle School. Catalini liked to weave in real world events into his teaching and that year, 1990, Massachusetts had an open gubernatorial race. Three-term governor Michael Dukakis had decided not to run again, and the general election came down to Republican William Weld and Democrat John Silber.
“I remember that Silber was the underdog,” Kornacki said. “It was just an exciting thing to watch this thing that wasn’t supposed to happen.”
After Silber won the primary, Catalini decided to hold a mock election for his sixth-graders, and sought volunteers to play each of the candidates. Kornacki raised his hand to play the Democrat.
From there, Kornacki sank himself into the campaign. He made signs, handed out leaflets, lobbied his peers in the cafeteria and on the playground, and read as much as he could about the race.
“He was very driven, very enthusiastic, very inquisitive,” said Catalini, now in 70s and living in Sandwich. “Wanting to dive into something or working hard — that was never an issue for Steve.”
Silber won the mock election. The real-life Silber, however, lost in a nail-biter.
Kornacki said he was “crushed” by the result, but Silber’s loss didn’t deter his newfound love for politics. In 1993, Kornacki advocated for a Proposition 2½ override in Groton to avoid massive school budget cuts, he recalled in a 2012 essay in The Groton Herald. He also volunteered at the time for a state representative.
But the more lasting experience came right after the real-world general election, when Catalini walked Kornacki and his classmates through the town-by-town results of the actual race.
“These are all cities and towns — I knew the names — but I didn’t know anything about why one would be Democratic, one would be Republican, and it explained to me what had happened in the actual election,” Kornacki said in an interview. “It was fascinating, and it just gave me a framework for the future.”
Just a few years later, when Kornacki was a student at Groton-Dunstable Regional High School, Catalini got a job as the school’s athletic director and men’s varsity basketball coach. While filling out his staff, he realized he needed a statistician. One can probably guess whom he chose.
“Of course it was Steve,” Catalini said.
Flash forward three decades, and Kornacki is still sifting through stats as he scrutinizes election results on TV. And now, viewers are seeing more of him than ever.
Earlier this year, NBC News launched the “Kornacki Cam,” a YouTube livestream that features more Kornacki and more of the big board, the giant election analysis monitor that made Kornacki and his khaki pants a star on MSNBC in 2020. When MSNBC — now called MS NOW — split from NBCUniversal last year, Kornacki signed a new deal with NBC. The network is planning for 13 hours of coverage starting at 5 p.m. on Election Day, with the Kornacki Cam starting at 5:30 p.m.
With his new gig, he’s also brought his signature big board breakdowns more frequently to sports. He contributes weekly to segments during NBC Sports’ Sunday night football games, has broken down snowboarding events at the 2026 Milan Olympics, and provided a digest of Kentucky Derby history.
Kornacki said his love for horse racing goes back to when he was a kid, and his uncle would take him to the now closed Suffolk Downs in East Boston and Rockingham Park in Salem, N.H.
“I love that it’s like a puzzle you’re trying to solve,” Kornacki said of thoroughbred racing. “You try to figure out what the pace of the race is going to be, who that might favor, who that might hurt.”
That’s not far off from his work analyzing congressional races across the country.
“It’s a very similar experience on an election night when you’re watching a state, and the map fill in one county at a time, and each county is sort of a puzzle piece,” he said. “You’re trying to anticipate what the complete picture is going to look like based on a fragment of information.”
Catalini and Kornacki reconnected at racetracks in New York. Last year, Catalini joined The Real Players to get behind the scenes of the sport he loves. Rasi Harper and Maurice Davis, two barbers from Saratoga Springs, N.Y., founded the site five years ago to document the people that help power the sport.
He has helped The Real Players with interviews, such as one video where Kornacki — nursing an extra-large Dunkin’ hot coffee, which he said he “can usually polish off two or three” per day — speaks with Hall of Fame trainer Shug McGaughey about his career.
“People will say that what I do is horse race journalism, and they mean it as pejorative. But I embrace it,” Kornacki said. “I get to talk to both sides, because both sides are ultimately interested in the same thing: Who is going to win? Who’s going to lose? Why is it happening?”
“It’s valuable to know the why of this, and that’s what I try to get at,” he added.
Aidan Ryan can be reached at aidan.ryan@globe.com. Follow him @aidanfitzryan.