Plot twist?
Earlier this evening, MSNBC predicted that Joe Biden could take the lead in Pennsylvania at perhaps 4:00am eastern time, depending on a number of variables. This raised the question of whether MSNBC and other major news outlets would then call Pennsylvania for Biden – and thus declare him the winner of the election – in the middle of the night.
Then at midnight, it was announced that Steve Kornacki had gone home for the night, and his understudy Ali Velshi was seen at the big board. But then at around 12:05am, Kornacki changed his mind and decided to come back on the air, stating that some more results from Philadelphia might come in within a couple hours.
Here’s the thing. Something changed Kornacki’s mind and prompted him to stay. It’s difficult to imagine that he would decide to put in a double shift unless he saw something in the numbers that made him conclude that Biden will indeed go ahead within the next couple hours, and that MSNBC could indeed end up calling the election for Biden in the middle of the night, and that he wanted to be there for it.
I don’t want to get your hopes up too much about the prospect of the election being called for Joe Biden tonight. But in general, thoroughly exhausted employees don’t clock out, hand things off to someone else, only to decide five minutes later that they want to pull a double shift, without a good reason for wanting to be there. I don’t know what this means, but it’s probably not nothing. In response to my Kornacki theory, Ali Velshi just sent me this: “That’s one theory. The other is that I’m just not as good at it as he is.”
