Hoda Kotb Celebrates Daytime Emmy Nomination After 'Today' Exit

Hoda Kotb is ready to take Kelly Clarkson’s crown — er, her Emmy Award.

Kotb, 60, playfully called out Clarkson, 43, while celebrating her and Jenna Bush Hager’s Emmy nomination for Outstanding Daytime Talk Series Host via a FaceTime call appearance on Today With Jenna & Friends on Monday, July 14.

“Hoda, listen. We have never won [an Emmy] but I think this could be our year. The last time’s the charm,” Bush Hager, 43, told her former Today With Hoda & Jenna cohost.

Kotb responded, “Let me tell you something, this is our last hurrah. This is happening. ‘Kelly Clarkson, who?’ is what I’d like to say. I’m kidding. We love Kelly so much … but it’s our turn.”

Though Bush Hager asked if she and Kotb needed to launch a “campaign” to secure their win, Kotb had a different approach in mind.

“No, you know the whole law of attraction. Don’t chase. Remember this, Jenna. No one runs for a bus they’re already on,” the former NBC News anchor pointed out.

Clarkson, who launched her talk show in 2019, won the award in 2023 and was nominated again in 2024. Prior to that, the Outstanding Daytime Talk Series Host award was split into two categories — Informative and Entertainment — and Clarkson won the Entertainment category in 2020, 2021 and 2022.

Kotb and Bush Hager, meanwhile, were nominated for the Entertainment category in 2021 and 2022, as well as the Informative category in 2020.

Bush Hager told guest Ciara that she felt like she and Kotb were the “Susan Lucci of Daytime Emmy hosts,” referring to the All My Children actress who lost the Daytime Emmy for Outstanding Lead Actress in a Drama Series award 18 times before she finally won in 1999.

“But to get to be nominated next to Hoda after the show is complete … I’m so happy,” she added.

Kotb announced in September 2024 that she was leaving Today after nearly 30 years at NBC.

“I just turned 60, and it was such a monumental moment for me when I turned 60 years old because I started thinking about that decade, like, what does that decade mean? What does it hold? What’s it gonna have for me?” she said at the time. “And I realized that it was time for me to turn the page at 60 and to try something new.”

Kotb said that celebrating her 60th birthday helped her realize it was time to step back from Today.

“I remembered standing outside, looking at this beautiful bunch of people with all these gorgeous signs, and I thought, ‘This is what the top of the wave feels like for me,’ and I thought, ‘It can’t get better,’” she continued. “And [I] decided this is the right time for me to, kind of, move on.”

Kotb also said she wanted to spend more time with her daughters, Haley, 9 and Hope, 5, whom she shares with ex-fiancé Joel Schiffman.

“I was thinking they deserve a bigger piece of my time, the pie that I have. I feel like we only have a finite amount of time,” she said. “And so, with all that being said, this is the hardest thing in the world.”

Kotb’s final broadcast on Today was on January 10. At one point during the emotional episode, she read a letter in which she reflected on her time with NBC. Kotb said that her years hosting alongside Bush Hager were filled with “uncontrollable laughter and pure friendship.”

“I can hardly even say her name without laughing out loud, but that is not the part I fell in love with,” she added. “I fell in love with her tears, her vulnerable, lovable self.”