12/9/2023 0 Comments Nytimes election needleKahn told me that after the 2016 election, there were people within the Times who felt that the needle shouldn’t be brought back at all. As CBS News noted at the time, “For political watchers on Twitter on election days, following the New York Times election ‘needle’ is an addiction-before it’s then derided for swinging too wildly or simply being wrong.” “We can’t responsibly make a forecast without data from there,” Cohn explained on Twitter, where politics junkies had a field day blabbing about the decision. In March, the needle was back for the special election in Pennsylvania’s 18th Congressional District, but the Times ended up having to take it down at the eleventh hour because a key county didn’t make its precinct results available. That night, the needle also helped drive more than 13 million views to an election results page on -making that page one of the most-read pieces of 2017-and inspired several memes and a Twitter hashtag along the way. “If Roy Moore won, it would have been the end of our live forecast dial,” Cohn later wrote. The Times brought it out last December for the Alabama special election, when it correctly predicted evangelical Republican Roy Moore’s humiliating loss to Democrat Doug Jones. This isn’t the needle’s first reappearance since its dramatic swing toward Trump 24 months ago. It was as if the needle itself had proudly announced that a bawdy real-estate magnate and former host of The Apprentice was about to become America’s 45th president. It was also a cold, hard reality check on the conventional wisdom and polling acumen of the coastal classes. If at first it had been a balm, the needle was now a nightmare vision-a living, breathing representation of the Establishment’s failure to comprehend just how powerfully Trump’s gospel had resonated with 62,984,828 members of the electorate. But as the hours went by, more and more of the real-time polling-station data upon which the needle was based flowed forth, and the perpetually quivering device began to swing wildly, veering further and further into the red. Additionally, it provided the starting point for the needle-also prominently displayed on -which began the night tilting reassuringly toward the blue end of the forecast dial.įor anyone anxious about the possibility of a Donald Trump presidency, however fantastical it still seemed at that point, looking at the needle was as calming as a hit of Xanax. In the days and hours leading up to the earliest returns, the 85 percent figure was featured heavily in Times news coverage and on the home page. That prediction was based on the Times’s internal aggregation of all the credible polls heading into the homestretch of the race. On November 8, 2016, the Times’s pre-election data initially showed Hillary Clinton with an 85 percent chance of victory. Clinton, is a symbol of the speed with which political hopes can be upended, as well as the maddening uncertainty of polling-and liberals are still deeply haunted by it. “TOO SCARY EMILY,” agreed journalist Lauren Duca. “That’s gonna trigger Brooklyn,” CNN’s Jake Tapper replied. On a large piece of white cardboard dangling from her neck with string, Nussbaum had drawn a picture of The New York Times’s election needle, an interactive feature that famously traumatized Times readers. It was right before Halloween, with Election Day a little more than a week away, and Emily Nussbaum, The New Yorker’s television critic, “made the scariest costume I could think of,” she tweeted.
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