The New York Times is rolling out its Needle election predictor – probably – Poynter

A November surprise in the mysterious art of write-in election calls arrived Tuesday morning, when The New York Times wrote that the needle is back – but only if the technical support behind it works.

The predictive tool, widely ridiculed after flopping back and forth in the 2016 presidential race and underestimating Donald Trump’s chances never really went away. After some adjustments, it accurately called a volatile Senate race in Alabama in 2017 and has been used in primaries and general elections ever since.

The key difference from other election winner-loser calls is that the needle offers real-time probability estimates well before a final result is available. The two main election data services — AP VoteCast and Edison Research — are waiting until they’re almost certain who won, in this contentious year more than ever.

Associated Press managing editor Julie Pace told me in an interview several months ago that the massive VoteCast operation absolutely will not speculate on a winner until that security threshold is met. (Customers can choose to give their own commentators more leeway.)

Both the Times story Tuesday morning and a midday X thread by chief political analyst Nate Cohn offered a qualification. With Times Tech Guild workers on strike, it may prove difficult to impossible to fix bugs. At worst, a live version of Needle will not be published.

“If we’re unable to live stream the needle’s results, our reporters plan to run its statistical model periodically, examine its output, and post updates in our live blog about what they’re seeing — giving our readers a sense of where the race actually stands over the course of the night,’ The Times wrote in an explanation.

Cohn addressed the likelihood in his post: “I don’t know if we’re going to be able to release the needle. There are good reasons to bet against it, although there might be scenarios where things run super smoothly; alternately we hit mistakes in the start and there is no chance.”

Access to the needle and other coverage will be free, at least initially.

In the wake of the 2016 backlash, the Times said the needle was not wrong, just misunderstood. One confusion that Tuesday’s story addresses is that if the needle shows a 75% chance that a candidate will win, that also means there is a one in four chance that she will lose.

Not a complicated concept if explained. My guess is that it’s all the more understandable in 2024 as legalized sports betting has taken off. A popular feature of sports betting is to allow betting while a game is in progress and the odds change.

Even non-gambling news consumers may find the pin a good source to watch, provided it overcomes technical challenges and becomes airborne. It’s in addition to what you’ll see on the national networks and other papers that play by the AP or Edison Research rules.

New York Times spokesman Charlie Stadtlander mildly disputed my odds reference in an email: “It’s not correct to frame it as ‘oddsmaking,’ but rather correct contextualization of the data that comes from returns. … The purpose of the pin is to set election results in the right context as they come in. Early returns are often very misleading; the first votes counted often differ significantly from those remaining.”

Here are some other notes on upcoming decision calls before the counts start:

Transparency: AP’s Pace has told me and other interviewers that the biggest change in this cycle is doubling down on transparency — offering more and longer explanatory methods.

Washington Post and The Wall Street Journal followed this example last week with pieces on how they will make calls. I learned from Posten that its editors see a particular advantage in VoteCast detecting errors in the flow of incoming information and quickly correcting them. Posten also invests in an extra dose of data by subscribing to Edison’s product as well as AP’s.

Independence: A complication of the system is that editors act as an intermediary between the data providers and those who announce decision calls on air or on websites. So an AP client (Fox News in 2020 was an example) can choose to make a call earlier or later than AP itself.

The vendors and some of the network data desks work in isolation from the rest of the election night reporting, sometimes literally in a closed room. Many commentators on a left-wing or right-wing network can be counted on to spin incoming results in favor of their side. The decision operations can bypass this. Hence the Arizona drama of 2020, with Fox News calling the state for Biden well before leftist or middle-of-the-road businesses did.

AP unfiltered: The AP is the most frequent source of calls, in statewide and local races as well as the presidency, and is typically credited. An alternative for those who want to see what AP is currently saying is to go directly to the wire service’s own site, apnews.com.

Another decision table: There is an alternative to the two major providers, descriptively called Decision Desk HQ. It’s an established but smaller firm that boasts an eclectic client base, including The Economist, The 19th and newish NewsNation networks. Decision Desk can offer another overview of the status of channel hoppers.

Numbers nerds like me who want more details on the process might want to check out some of these links early in the evening before the cascade of updated state-by-state totals takes the stage and makes all the noise.

Poynter media business reporter Angela Fu and Poynter contributor Nicole Slaughter Graham contributed to this report.

This article was updated to include a quote from a New York Times spokesperson and to note that the pin will be free to readers.