Elections and Handicapping: A Perspective on Both
Steve Kornacki
Steve Kornacki, Chief Data Analyst, NBC News


All right, thank you for that and thank you for bringing me up here. People have said it’s nice of me to come. I said, are you kidding? I get out of the office, I get to come to Saratoga in the middle of the summer. This is a pretty good deal for me. So it’s exciting to be here. It’s an honor to be here. I’ve enjoyed getting to meet some of you last night at the dinner and a little bit before the speeches today. And some of you, I recognize I’ve had the pleasure of meeting long before this, so it’s very good to be with you today.

I’ve enjoyed the presentations we’ve heard so far. I will say this, I work, as you may know, in politics in elections, I’m Switzerland when it comes to that. I will back no candidates. I take no positions on issues. But I will say that when Shawn was talking about that provision about the deductibility of gambling losses, I paid very close attention. I can say that.

But the title of this presentation you might’ve noticed in the program is Elections and Handicapping: a Perspective on Both. So I was trying to think what would be a good way of getting into that. And I thought maybe go back in time. So about a decade ago is where I want to take you to the summer of 2016. This was actually going to be the week that the Republican national convention that year was starting. You probably remember Donald Trump had just won the primaries. He’s going to be nominated as the Republican candidate. And at that time I was hosting two hours a day of live coverage. And one thing I’ve learned in television through the years is that no matter how much is going on in the world, two hours is a lot of time to fill. So I was always trying to think of what can we do that’s unique or fresh or new, just something different to keep the eyeballs watching and not going to another channel.

So I started thinking back then, what could we do that week? Trump’s going to be nominated, no suspense, everybody knows the story. And that is when I got to thinking about the overlap that I think you all probably know something about between the terminology we often use to describe elections, political campaigns, and how we talk about horse racing. We’ve got front runners, we’ve got favorites, we’ve got candidates jockeying for position, I could go on and on. So I said that week, what if we re-imagined this Republican primary race that Donald Trump had just won, that everybody was talking about. What if we reimagined it as a horse race and what if we got a world-class announcer to call it? And this is what happened.

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Thank you. Thank you. That was new, that was different, that was fun. And I don’t think I need to tell anybody here, but I want to make sure to give credit there. That was Dave Johnson. And not only giving that call obviously, but that was Dave who found that particular race that matched up the dynamics – matched up so closely to that Republican primary race. So look, it was mission accomplished just from the standpoint of doing something different, but that segment also was deeper to me in terms of what it meant. I say that because as you might know, I’m a horse racing fan. I’ve always been a horse racing fan. I’m also a huge fan of Dave Johnson. His calls played no small role in drawing me into this sport way back in the first place as a kid. Tempo, drama, urgency. I think if you’ve watched him through the years, he elevated the experience of watching a race.

The first Kentucky Derby that I can remember was 1987: Alysheba running down Bet Twice. Anyone remember that? I can still hear Dave’s call standing here right now. I could still tell you where I was. I could put myself back in that moment of watching that race. And if you had told me back then that all those years later I’d get to team up with Dave for something like that, I don’t think I would’ve believed it. But I think in that way I’ve been very lucky. I’ve been very fortunate. I’ve made most of my career in politics and elections. I’ve enjoyed it. But through that work and everything that’s come with it, I’ve gotten to meet so many people who are involved in this sport in so many different ways, and it’s given me an avenue into this sport in so many different ways. Obviously a better viewer. I’ve also been able to do it now as a broadcaster, even as a part owner. I see Terry Finley there, a West Point partner. You’re getting overwhelmed with West Point partners here. I know Griffin Johnson’s coming later. So big day for West Point here, but that’s been an exciting thing for me through the years.

Like with so many others, how did I get into the sport in the first place? It was through a relative. In my case, it was my Uncle Joe. And I think everybody knows in Uncle Joe-like character in their lives. He’s a larger than life figure. Hands out nicknames to everybody. Sharky, Shaky, the Commissioner. These are characters that I was exposed to at a dangerously formative stage in my life. Thanks to my Uncle Joe. He’s just a magnet for Damon Runyon characters. He loves the action of the track. He owns a beach store, still does, did when I was a kid, in Southern Maine. Friday nights he’d slip out and go where: Scarborough Downs. Unfortunately, the late lamented Scarborough Downs. He took me there for the first time when I was 6 years old.

[We apologize, the conference audio was interrupted for approximately one minute. From Kornacki’s notes:

He handed me the program and I was captivated. I absorbed the culture of the track, too. My uncle had picked up a system at Suffolk Downs in Boston – Sufferin’ Downs he loves to call it. The 13 System. Real simple: You add up the horse’s finishing position in its last three races, and if the number comes out to 13, you bet the horse. For example – a horse that had finished 10th, 2nd, and 1st in its last three races would be a 13. This became my job when I went to the track with my uncle – go through the program and circle all of the 13s. He would tell my mom this was his way of teaching me math.]

Now I like to think I’ve become a much more sophisticated handicapper as I’ve gone along, (I think we got the sound coming back here) a much more sophisticated handicapper, but the muscle memory is still there. If I go out to Saratoga today and I open up that program, I will invariably circle the 13s. And actually a friend of mine, I was telling him about the system once, and he got interested in just in how unscientific it was. So he did a study and he took one of the big tracks and he looked at a period of one year and he said, if you had bet every horse over that period of time who was a 13, the ROI would’ve been, well, it would’ve been massively negative. But when I took that information to my Uncle Joe, he scoffed and he said, sample’s too small. So I think the jury is still out on the 13 system.

My uncle may have been joking about trying to teach me math through horse racing, but I think there’s actually some truth to that. My mind works pretty well with numbers in many ways. It’s how I’ve learned to make sense of the world. I learned at a young age that if I can put a number on something and can compare it to something else, then I can understand it. So when I opened up that program at Scarborough Downs, it was a pretty natural outlet for that. I found other outlets, too, as I grew up. The one that’s ended up shaping so much of my life and my career, of course, involves politics and, more specifically, elections. And there’s a lot of overlap between my interest in elections and my interest in horse racing. In each case, there’s a tantalizing puzzle. Here’s a field of candidates, here’s a field of horses. Who should win, who can win, who can’t win, who might have a better chance of winning than anyone seems to realize?

And in horse racing, it doesn’t matter if it’s a stakes race or if it’s a non-winners of two lifetime race out of Canterbury Park, and I love Canterbury Park by the way. The puzzle is there. The challenge is there. It’s the same in politics and elections. It could be the presidential race, it could be a contest for city council somewhere. Give me a set of candidates, give me a field of horses. I want to understand what the relevant metrics are, and I want to make sense of the race. And just like in horse racing when it comes to elections, there is no shortage of metrics that you could use to try to understand the campaign. Polling, fundraising, ad expenditures, endorsement tallies, each candidate’s track record in past elections. Of course the metrics can be deceptive, you can be led astray. The old Mark Twain line comes to mind about how there’s lies, damn lies, and statistics. But horse racing and political campaigns also come with the satisfying promise of finality. After all the predictions from all the players about what is going to happen, what the outcome will be, and why we’re going to find out. There will be an answer. We will learn who was right and we will learn who was wrong.

Now, there are some critics in my profession who might roll their eyes at some of what I’m saying right now, because I’m talking about politics and political campaigns as a competition. The criticism that they would have, the term they use for this, you might’ve heard it, is horse race journalism, and it’s meant to be pejorative. The idea is that covering a campaign from the standpoint of who’s winning and who’s losing shortchanges weightier, substantive, more important matters and trivializes the process. Now, I have literally spent the last few minutes making a comparison between political campaigns and horse racing. So if they’re accusing me of practicing horse race journalism, I’m probably not in a good position to deny it. But that’s okay because honestly, I embrace the term, and I actually think there is some value in what I do.

And I say this because there are two trends that have massively accelerated over the course of my career covering politics and elections. I’m sure it’s something you see in your own lives. I know it’s something I’ve seen in my own life. And that is that people who barely followed politics not that long ago are now into it to a level I never could have imagined. And not only that, they’ve picked sides. They’re team red or they’re team blue. You could call this polarization, you could call this tribalism, whatever you want. But what it means for what I do is that most people, more people than ever in fact, are deeply invested in the outcome of elections. They want to understand the dynamics of a campaign because they want to make sure their side wins or they want to make sure the other side loses. And I think this puts me in a position that I feel lucky to occupy because amidst all of the polarization and all of those deep divides that are out there, I get to talk to both sides because I am talking about one of the few areas where there actually is common ground between them.

They both want to know who’s, who’s down, and why. And so do I. So I’m happy to call myself a horse race journalist. And as I mentioned at the beginning it’s through my career as a horse race journalist that I’ve actually gotten to experience the sport of horse racing in ways I could never have dreamed of when I was a kid. Just after the 2020 election, the folks at NBC sports called and they asked me if I’d take part in Sunday night football, looking at the playoff chase using a probability model to break it down. Now I’m a huge football fan. This was an unbelievable moment to get that call, thrilling thing to get to do. And fortunately they thought it went well enough that when the season was over, they came back to me and they said, are there any other sports that we broadcast that you might be interested in?

And I thought about that for a second, and I think you know what answer I might’ve given the folks at NBC sports. And so it was that on the first Saturday of May of 2021, I got to check off a bucket list item. It was the first time that I ever got to go to the Kentucky Derby in person, which was a thrill in and of itself. And I also got to be part of the broadcast team for that event, an event that I had consumed as a viewer every year since that first race with Alysheba back in 1987. Now on that day, NBC stationed me in front of a giant interactive touchscreen. There were some betting windows right behind us. I could walk 10 steps between segments and make all of my bets. Are you kidding me? And I got to share the area with Eddie Olczyk. He’s one of the on-air handicappers for NBC Sports. And I’ll never forget standing there, it was actually the day before for the Oaks. You may remember the race: Malathaat, Search Results, neck and neck to the wire. Of course I had neither one of them, so I’m tearing up my tickets afterwards and Edso comes over to me and he shows me his $500 straight exacta. That was an impressive thing to see. And talk about a perk. Between Edso and NBC’s other handicapper Matt Bernier, I’ve had the opportunity to be right there on racing’s biggest days with two pros to quiz them about their method, how they’re thinking about each race, how they’re structuring their bets, and most importantly to me, what they think about how I’m looking at the race. Now, as I said, I consider this a perk of the job. I think if you ask Edso or Matt Bernier about having to deal with me asking all of these questions as they’re going about their work on a huge day, they might have another term for it, but they’ve been unfailingly polite to me, been great to work with. The whole team has been.

So anyway, when it came to the Derby that year in 2021, I think you know how it goes for NBC. Before the race goes off everybody makes a prediction. It’s all meant to be in good fun. They even throw some celebrities in there every now and then. But I have to tell you, I felt enormous pressure. Because I was the new guy, and I was very aware that the horse racing audience either had no idea who I was or they knew me only as that guy who gets weirdly excited about elections on television. So I really wanted to pick the winner and more that I really, really didn’t want to pick a horse that finished up the track. So I thought about it, should I just take one of the favorites? That way if I’m wrong, I’m hardly alone. But I didn’t like the favorites in that race, and I did have this kind of weird gut feeling about a 12-to-1 shot who I thought would get to the lead and I thought maybe, maybe could just stay there through the whole race. So I agonized over this. I know it may sound ridiculous, but I thought this was such an important moment, at least back then. And it is how my first on-air pick for NBC Sports ended up being Medina Spirit in the 2021 Derby. And all I will say about that right now is they are not getting the money back.

Now, whether it was because of that or in spite of it, NBC has kept me as part of its team since then. Now mainly my job is to use that giant touchscreen to highlight various statistical angles, to tell historical stories. But this spring I had the chance to do something different, and for me, very special. I’ve talked about being interested in horse racing from the standpoint of stats and wagering, but I swear to you, I am not that bloodless of a person. I’m also a sucker for tradition, for pageantry, for characters, for underdog stories. And horse racing is a sport that is chockfull of all of these. And my all-time favorite character in this sport or any is D. Wayne Lucas, the late D. Wayne Lucas. When I first discovered horse racing, he was the king. This was the mid-1990s. Every year growing up he’d have that suit, he’d have those shades, he’d have that swagger, and I’d look up whatever triple crown race it was and there he was. He always seemed to be in the winner circle, and he always seemed to be saying, Hey, I got these 2- year-olds are going to be even better next year for me. So he was the king back then and I know you know all of his accomplishments and all of his accolades, so I won’t get into that right here, but I will tell you that what I admired about him, what I loved about him was that he never quit. Through his 70s and through his 80s, he still got up every single morning at ungodly hours. He worked his horses, he scrambled for clients, he adamantly refused to downsize his dreams for so long, it was like he was waging a war against time and somehow winning it.

My devotion to D. Wayne was well known to the folks at NBC Sports. and in April I got a phone call from Lindsay Schanzer, she’s the producer of our coverage, and she told me, get on a flight to Louisville. I was going to spend the morning with Lucas at his barn. We were going to put a piece together, we’d run it during this year’s Derby coverage. Now it has been said that you should never meet your heroes because it’ll only disappoint you. I can tell you for me, this is absolutely not the case. I got to the barn that day at 3:45 in the morning and sure enough, 15 minutes later, there he was driving in in his pickup truck, 89-year-old D. Wayne Lucas. He was generous with his time that morning. He was expansive in his thoughts. There were funny anecdotes, pearls of wisdom, there was genuine insight into human nature. And these ended up being some of the final public words he would offer about his life, about his career, and about his legacy. I don’t know if you saw the piece when it aired on NBC during the Derby, but the team did an incredible job, I think, putting it together. I feel like we created a worthy tribute to a legend. And I’ll say that no matter what else I do in television, whether it’s horse racing, elections, or anything else, I doubt I will ever be part of something so satisfying.

I keep this in mind when I think about the question that I know this entire industry is grappling with and that is the future of the sport. How to attract new people into it, how to build a sport, how to grow the sport. And I could talk about betting and I could give you my list of 12 things I’d love to see there, but I won’t because when I think of this bigger, broader question, it’s the Lucas side of the game that I think about. For me, this is much more than a gambling product. When I watched Wayne Lucas win the Preakness last year with Seize the Grey, I didn’t have a scent bet on that horse. And yet there I was as they turned for home, screaming my heart out for Seize the Grey to hold on. And when he did, just jumping with joy. I don’t think I’ve ever made a winning bet that felt as good and that felt as rewarding as a fan, seeing Lucas walk his way to the winner circle in Baltimore last year.

I’m also far from the only one who develops an attachment to the horses themselves. Do you remember a horse named Whitmore? He won the Breeders’ Cup Sprint a few years ago when he was 7. Larry Collmus called him “the old man” as he crossed the finish line. He was honest, he always showed up. He always came with a furious late charge. I loved Whitmore. His final race ended up being up here at Saratoga a few summers ago. Now I’m going to get in a little bit of trouble if some folks I know are watching this, but I can tell you that when that race went off, I was actually in a wedding in a church and I couldn’t get the video on my phone and sneak a peek at it, but what I could do was I could check Twitter, I could take a little glance at Twitter. So I was doing that, trying to get updates as the race went off, and in the middle of the service, and I almost gasped when I saw the update because Whitmore was injured. Whitmore was vanned and nobody knew what his condition was. And I sat there for the rest of the service. I felt stricken. It was a horrible, horrible thing to see and to not know. Now we got out, news came out, Whitmore was fine, he was going to be retired, but he was fine. The relief I experienced, it was deep, it was profound, and it was joyful. And those are not the emotions that you would just have if horse racing were only a gambling product.

A term that gets used a lot during our coverage on NBC for horse racing is sense of place. It’s a real point of emphasis in what we do. The idea is to try to capture what it feels like to be there at the Kentucky Derby or at the Breeders’ Cup or at Royal Ascot or wherever it may be. The experience obviously is an amazing one. And when I’m talking to people who aren’t horse racing fans, it’s not just betting that I’m talking to them about, it’s this, it’s this. This is what I’m trying to convey to them – a sense of place. And not only when it comes to the grand venues like Churchill on the First Saturday in May.

I don’t need to tell folks in this room there are tracks all over this country that still get a crowd, that still have energy, where the tradition runs deep, where there is a great day to be had. I live in New York, I’m always telling folks, take the family to Monmouth. Have a picnic. Give the kids 20 bucks. Bet on the races. See the horses in the paddock. I know snowbirds who head down to the Gulf Coast every winter, and I’m always telling them, take a drive over to Tampa Bay Downs, sit outside, watch the races, bask in the warm air, take in that lush green grass. Remind yourself, oh my gosh, it’s the middle of January and this is where I am.

I talk up tracks all over the country that I’ve been to that I want to go to. I talk about Oaklawn, I talk about Santa Anita on Boxing Day, Delmar in the summer. I talk about the smaller tracks too. Get to Fairmont Park on a Saturday night. I’m always telling people go out and see it, because I think that is the best advertisement there is for this sport, is to take somebody who is not a horse racing fan and who perhaps has all the wrong ideas about what this sport is all about and to get them out to the track and to have them walk away saying that was a great experience.

So that’s what I would like to leave you with. To urge all of us to think about how we can make that experience more available, in more ways, at more tracks, more frequently. And I will close back with my Uncle Joe, why not, with a line he likes to use. This is a corny one and I’m sure he got it from somebody else, so maybe you heard it before. But my Uncle Joe will ask me, he’ll say, what is the best day in the world? And I’ll say, what? And he says, it is a winning day at the track. And he says, now what is the second best day in the world? Well, I don’t know, what is it? It’s a losing day at the track. Because you’re at the track. Thank you very much.

VOG:

Thank you, Steve. Before we go to intermission, please watch this short video on Stable Recovery.

[VIDEO]

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