NBC News is putting Steve Kornacki back on the live election board Tuesday night, turning the Kornacki Cam on for the Los Angeles mayoral primary and California’s gubernatorial primary after polls close at 8 p.m. Pacific. He will stay live and uninterrupted on streaming platforms while results come in.
The timing matters because California’s contests can move fast once the first precincts report, and NBC News is betting viewers want one place to watch the numbers land. The network says the Kornacki Cam has already been sampled by 19 million viewers across 10 streamed sessions, a reach that helps explain why it is being deployed again for two of the state’s biggest races.
For Kornacki, the draw is not just the final count but the race unfolding in real time. He said in a phone interview Monday that the audience gets to see the whole thing in full view — the buildup, the anticipation and the payoff. The stream will be available on YouTube, NBCNews.com, the NBC News app, Instagram, Facebook and TikTok, and it will also cover several congressional districts once the California polls are closed.
In the Los Angeles mayoral contest, Kornacki said polling suggests Mayor Karen Bass is in the best position to get into the runoff, but he was quick to leave room for a break in the pattern. He said polling also points to Spencer Pratt as having had the most positive movement over the last month or so of the campaign, and he expects the vote to hinge on neighborhood-level turnout that could still shift quickly. The San Fernando Valley will be more than a third of the vote and probably close to 40%, he said, while Bass will need strength in central and South L.A., which together could account for probably a third of the vote. He added that the Westside could be more of a toss-up.
That is the friction in this race: the polling points one way, but Kornacki is not treating it like a settled script. He said he wants to watch whether the San Fernando Valley breaks heavily enough for Pratt if he gets into the general election, and whether Bass can hold her base while the Westside remains unsettled. Mayor’s races often come with thinner data than statewide contests, which makes the first wave of results especially useful and especially unstable.
What NBC News is promising Tuesday is not just a stream, but a live test of whether its results format can keep up with two high-stakes California races at once. The network said its decision desk has called the results of 70% of the 2026 elections ahead of the, and Kornacki’s uninterrupted coverage is built to make those calls feel immediate. If the early precincts behave the way the polling suggests, Bass should emerge as the one to beat. If they do not, the first live hours after 8 p.m. Pacific may be where the race really starts.
