When it comes to elections, millions of viewers have their eyes on NBC News Chief Data Analyst Steve Kornacki via the Kornacki Cam, as he analyzes electoral data on the Big Board.
On Tuesday, all eyes, including Kornacki’s will be on the Palmetto State for the special U.S. Senate Republican primary runoff between Sen. Darline Graham and 5th District Congressman Ralph Norman.
So what is Kornacki watching for and where?
South Carolina Public Radio’s Gavin Jackson spoke with Kornacki on Aug. 21, hours before President Donald Trump’s rally with Graham in Myrtle Beach.
This interview has been edited for brevity.
Q: How do you view this condensed campaign that was prompted by Sen. Lindsey Graham’s sudden death 45 days ago and the results of the Aug. 11 primary?
Kornacki: My big question coming out of the preliminary was did Graham do well enough in that preliminary where the rest of the party was going to say, ‘OK, let's get behind her now, let's consolidate it, sort of make the runoff kind of a formality,' or was she showing some vulnerability that could create a suspenseful runoff.
And just by the fact that Trump is there, which is indicating the White House feels this is necessary because it is a deal that is not sealed yet. And then looking at what happened in the debate the other night, obviously her answer on national security, foreign policy certainly got a lot of attention nationally. It just feels to me, and we're going without kind of good numbers here, but it feels to me like it's a volatile race and one that I'm now looking at Tuesday night as being potentially a suspenseful night.
Q: Some 63,700 voters cast early, in-person ballots. That’s 3% higher than the Aug. 11 primary early voting turnout. What, if anything, can we deduce from this?
Kornacki: The early voting numbers have jumped out at me, too. It can always be dangerous reading too much into those. But it does have me wondering, again, if this campaign kind of touched a nerve. I think the grand strategy in a lot of this, and they would never say it this way, but I think they (Graham campaign) thought this would sort of play out almost like a coronation.
You know, she gets appointed by the governor, Trump asks her to run, Trump immediately endorses the full term. You know, she goes for that.
And I think that this sort of idea there was the party would fall in line and this would be sort of a low wattage affair. And if you're seeing the early voting numbers that we're seeing, it suggests this is more of like a high-wattage campaign.
And I’m not sure that works to her benefit. So it's one of those reasons why I'm thinking of this as suspenseful.
The big question to me is where you are today, Myrtle Beach, you know the 7th Congressional District, Russell Fry's district. He swept in his district. He made no incursions anywhere outside of his district, but he swept his district and obviously there are a ton of votes in Horry County. He’s gotten behind Graham, but have his voters moved with it?
If voters have moved with him, I think she's in great shape. But I think it's a very open question.
Q: When we look at pathways to victory, what does Norman need to do?
Kornacki: I think his advantage is he did really well in the place you want to do really well in a Republican primary in South Carolina, back in the preliminary and that is the Upstate. Just look at Greenville and Spartanburg together, they're probably about 20% of the vote in a Republican primary. And he put up huge numbers there.
He could get a lot of mileage out of that. I think you layer on top of that the fact that, again, when you're talking about the Upstate, you're talking about a region where I think the most sort of skepticism about that Graham name among Republicans is going to be found. In the Upstate is where Lindsey Graham typically did worse in his final primary campaign.
I think the weakness for the Graham name and you have strength for Norman in this area. It's just very, very vote rich in the Republican primary. For him, it's about winning there and it's about running up the score there.
Q: What about a path for a Graham victory?
Kornacki: She she had kind of a breadth of support in the preliminary. It wasn't that she was putting up landslide numbers anywhere. She was just running basically first or second everywhere. That gets right to the question I have about Russell Fry's district, the 7th Congressional District, where she was the second choice behind Fry.
Is she the first choice in the in the runoff? She actually needs that because Norman’s coming in with the Upstate. I think it's crucial for her. I expect her to do pretty well in the Lowcountry, but I think we saw in the preliminary the turnout wasn't as great there.
So then it sort of comes down to me looking at the Midlands, Richland County and Lexington County. That to me is a toss up area (that) almost has the potential to be a bellwether area.
Q: What about the Trump factor?
Kornacki: There's a test here of Trump's pull, because we we've seen him have his greatest success in Republican primaries around the country when there's two candidates and he says 'One of these candidates is on my side and the other one's the enemy.’ Here you've got a situation where both of these candidates are telling the voters they are on Trump's side 100%.
So, where you got to very, very pro-Trump candidates in a place like Myrtle Beach and in that area with Trump coming in himself and saying, OK to vote pro-Trump vote Graham and are the voters responsive to that. And I think a lot of Graham's candidacy, I think hinges on the answer being yes.
Q: So this is a pretty big gamble for Trump, especially after he issued a dual endorsement in the Republican gubernatorial primary runoff here in June?
Kornacki: You mentioned what happened in the governor's race. Just this past Tuesday down in Florida, Trump endorsed a congressional candidate, who lost her Republican primary. He endorsed out in Wyoming a gubernatorial candidate this past Tuesday who lost soundly in the primary. So we've gotten a couple of indications here in the very past few days about the power of this Trump endorsement not being the be all and end all and again, it just strikes me.
I feel there's a difference in the strength of an endorsement when one of the candidates is sort of in a race where you got two candidates and one of them has kind of strayed from Trump in public ways, when Trump comes against that candidate Trump’s been very successful in getting voters to turn on that candidate. When both candidates are presenting themselves as 100% pro-Trump and he comes in and says, ‘hey choose this one’ voters feel a lot more wiggle room.
