While the hours (now days) continue to pass without a consensus on election night’s main decision, lots of folks (or at least MSNBC viewers) did seem to quickly come to an agreement on one thing: Steve Kornacki’s tireless, county-by-county forecasts stole the show. After seeing our friends at Vulture debate whether Kornacki’s “butt looks especially good or we’re just slowly being driven mad,” we found ourselves taking a closer look at the political correspondent’s bottom half — not to examine his butt, but to see if we could identify the pants covering it and whether they had something to do with making it look as good as our colleagues imagined it did.
Regular MSNBC viewers will know that Kornacki often wears khakis on election night, so I shot an email over to his producer, Adam Noboa, asking if Kornacki has a go-to spot for his prime-time uniform. He answered with two words: “The Gap!” While I couldn’t get more from Noboa or Kornacki (votes are still being counted, after all), armed with this information, I studied the color of his pants and compared it to all of The Gap’s current khaki offerings. Gap calls the distinctive color of Kornacki’s 2020 election pants “palomino brown,” and that color only comes in two styles of pant: the Modern Khaki and the Essential Khaki. Upon closer inspection, Gap’s Essential Khaki pants have a distinctive curved line of stitching next to the fly, something the Modern Khaki pants — and Kornacki’s pair — do not.
Gap’s Modern Khaki, however, comes in five cuts: skinny, slim, straight, relaxed, and athletic. While Kornacki has certainly veered baggy in the past, the pair he wore this year simply does not appear roomy enough to be either of the wider-legged relaxed or athletic cuts. But the pants he wore this year also seem to have more room in the leg (at least from the above-the-knee footage we’ve seen) than a skinny cut would provide. Of the two that remain — slim and straight — it’s really a toss-up. While I can’t say for sure, based on the pant creases I’ve seen around Kornacki’s thigh (and the fact he doesn’t seem like the kind of guy to drop from baggy to slim in one midterm cycle), I’m calling straight-fit the winner. But I’ve also included the slim cut below, because if we learned anything this week, it’s that the experts can (occasionally) be wrong.
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