Quotes from Steve Kornacki

What I really love is modern political history. I love the research process, whether it's digging through old newspaper stories, artifacts from election campaigns or TV stories and being able to recreate moments in history that - when you look back at them now - you can get to that question of how did we get here.

There was a certain futility to Elizabeth Colbert Busch's congressional campaign, one that had nothing to do with her and everything to do with the state and region she calls home.

There's always been deep divisions in this country - we had a civil war - and there've been regional and cultural and demographic. They've always been there.

Following college sports as a kid, I'd be like: Clemson. Where the hell is Clemson? By learning sports rivalries, you learn the regions and the culture of a state.

I'll sometimes forget it's my birthday, but my mom has taken to calling me at the exact time of my birth, so that'll usually remind me. It was an important moment for me, obviously, but I guess a more memorable one for her.

I don't read a ton of fiction, but Tom Wolfe's death got me to pick up 'The Bonfire of the Vanities.' I'm a slow reader, but wow - I ended up devouring it in about six days. I'm fascinated with that period, the '80s, when the country was turning around but it seemed like New York and other cities were just hopelessly lost.

The Romney who showed up at CPAC in early 2007 vehemently embraced the conservative cause and openly mocked his home state and its liberal reputation.

History suggests that the opportunity to run again for the presidency four years after losing is reserved for those who exceeded expectations their first time out - not for the John Connallys of politics.

Football coaches aren't the most diverse group, which may help explain their political similarities.

I've read stories from people who say they always knew they were attracted to the same sex, or that they figured it out at a young age. I'm not one of them. I had practically no idea until one night in my sophomore year of high school.

As a general rule, midterm elections - in both their first terms and their second terms - aren't kind to incumbent presidents, even popular ones. Just two years after winning a 49-state landslide, for instance, Ronald Reagan watched his party lose control of the Senate and slip further into the minority in the House in 1986.

Immigration has been [Donald] Trump's signature issue throughout his entire presidential campaign, and his supporters love him for it.

Race has clearly played a role in Kentucky's Obama-phobia, as it has in other swaths of Appalachia. The Obama administration's supposed 'war on coal' is a big factor too.

Generally, the real question in a midterm year is whether the damage for the ruling party will be severe or mild.

Running 26 miles is a feat that demands respect, no matter how long it takes.

I think I'm statistically literate and numbers-oriented. But I'm nowhere near as sophisticated as a lot of other folks I see. Maybe that helps me not get too jargony and communicate this stuff in a way that's somewhat accessible.

From the end of Reconstruction through the civil rights revolution, the South was an almost uniformly Democratic region. In 1936, for example, Franklin Roosevelt won more than 98 percent of the vote in South Carolina.

Prior to civil rights, the Democratic Party had been defined by an increasingly untenable alliance of ideological opposites - integrationist Northern liberals like Hubert Humphrey and Herbert Lehman teamed with Southern segregationists like Richard Russell and John Stennis.

The godfather of the modern Mississippi Republican Party, Charles Pickering, left the Democrats in 1964 because the party's national convention agreed to seat two black delegates.

Evan Bayh learned early that liberalism and ambition don't always mix in a red state like Indiana.

New Jersey's governorship is the most powerful in the nation.

On the campaign trail, [Donald] Trump has threatened a trade war and repeatedly said that Mexico will pay for a wall on the Southern border.

I have a specialization in a very particular area: the presidential primary process.

In 1948, northern liberals inserted a civil rights plank into the national Democratic platform, prompting a walkout of Southern delegations - which then coalesced around the third party Dixiecrat candidacy of Strom Thurmond. An uneasy truce between national and Southern Democrats was reached after that election, but it was untenable.