The New York Times presents its Needle election predictor – probably – Poynter

A November surprise in the arcane art of vote-calling at the decision-making table came Tuesday morning when the New York Times wrote that the Needle is back — but only if the technical support behind it works.

The prediction tool, widely derided after it vacillated back and forth during the 2016 presidential campaign and underestimated Donald Trump's chances, never really went away. After some refinements, a volatile Senate race emerged in Alabama in 2017 and has been used in primaries and general elections since then.

The main difference from other election winner-loser calls is that the Needle provides real-time probability estimates long before a final result is available. The two main election data services — AP VoteCast and Edison Research — are waiting until they are virtually certain who won, more so than ever in this contentious year.

Julie Pace, executive editor of the Associated Press, told me in an interview a few months ago that there is absolutely no speculation about a winner in the massive VoteCast operation until that certainty threshold is reached. (Customers can give their own commenters more leeway.)

Both the Times article Tuesday morning and a midday X-thread from chief political analyst Nate Cohn offered a qualification. With Times Tech Guild employees on strike, troubleshooting disruptions could prove difficult or impossible. In the worst case scenario, a live version of the Needle will not be released.

“If we are unable to live stream the Needle results, our journalists plan to regularly test the statistical model, review the results and post updates on our live blog about what they see – to give our readers a sense of it to reveal where the race actually ends over the course of the night,” the Times wrote in a statement.

Cohn addressed the probabilities in his post: “I don’t know if we can release the needle. There are good reasons to bet against it, but there may also be scenarios where everything goes super smoothly; Alternatively, we encounter errors at the beginning and there is no chance.”

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

After the 2016 setback, the Times said the Needle wasn't wrong, just misunderstood. One confusion addressed in Tuesday's story is that when the Needle shows a 75 percent chance of a candidate winning, it also means there is a one in four chance of her losing.

Not a complicated concept when explained. I suspect this is even more understandable in 2024 as sports betting legalization has taken off. A popular feature in sports betting is to allow betting while a game is in progress and the odds change.

Even news consumers who aren't gamblers might find The Needle a good source to watch, provided it overcomes technical challenges and gets on the air. It's in addition to what you'll see on national networks and other newspapers that follow AP or Edison Research rules.

New York Times spokesman Charlie Stadtlander mildly disagreed with my odds statement in an email: “It is not correct to call it 'odds-making,' but rather to properly contextualize the data from the returns.”…The purpose of the needle is to put election results in the right context as they come in. Early results are often very misleading; The first votes counted often differ significantly from those that are still left.”

Here are some more clues about upcoming decision calls before the count begins:

Transparency: AP's Pace told me and other interviewers that the biggest change this cycle is doubling down on transparency and offering more and longer explanations of methodology.

The Washington Post and Wall Street Journal followed suit last week with articles about how they will make their calls. I learned from the Post that its editors see a particular advantage in VoteCast's ability to identify errors in the flood of incoming information and quickly correct them. The postal service is also investing in an additional dose of data by subscribing to Edison's product in addition to the APs.

Independence: A complication of the system is that editors form a middle layer between the data providers and those who announce decision calls over the air or on websites. So an AP customer (Fox News in 2020 was an example) might choose to place a call sooner or later as AP itself.

The vendors and some of the network data desks work in isolation from the rest of the election night coverage, sometimes literally in a locked room. It's safe to assume that many commentators on a left- or right-leaning network will skew the incoming results to their side. The decision operations can avoid this. Hence the Arizona drama in 2020, with Fox News calling the state for Biden long before left-leaning or center-leaning media outlets did.

AP unfiltered: AP is the most common source of calls in state, local and presidential races and is typically credited. An alternative for those who want to see exactly what the AP is saying is to go directly to the news service's own website, apnews.com.

Another Decision Desk: There is an alternative to the two major providers, aptly named Decision Desk HQ. It's an established but smaller company with a diverse customer base, including The Economist, The 19th and the new NewsNation network. Decision Desk can provide channel hoppers with a further overview of the current status.

Numbers nerds like me who want more details about the process might want to check out some of these links early this 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 staff writer Nicole Slaughter Graham contributed to this report.

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