Update: At about 8:30 p.m. ET, The New York Times’ Needle went live. On its web page, it said the election was “a tossup,” but it nonetheless estimated Trump to win 279 electoral votes, compared to 259 votes for Harris.
Original story: The New York Times is already feeling the effect of its tech employees going on strike on Tuesday, with the paper’s Election Night model, dubbed the “Needle,” likely not being available to readers.
On previous Election Days, the Needle gave Times readers an idea of where the election was leaning, based on votes that had been counted. The Needle is now in jeopardy, though, after The Times Tech Guild, a group representing more than 600 software developers and data analysts, went on strike Monday.
The Times, in a story on Tuesday, said the Needle depends on “computer systems maintained by engineers across the company, including some who are currently on strike.” Whether The Times publishes the live version of The Needle, the paper said, will depend on how its internal systems are processing data and “if we are confident those systems are stable.”
If The Needle is unavailable to the public, NYT reporters will still be periodically updated on what the model is showing — allowing them to publish election updates without its Needle graphic.
New York Times chief political analyst Nate Cohn, in a thread on X, said the “brittle” nature of The Needle, thanks to its “huge data load,” could mean it won’t appear in the paper’s coverage.
“There will be bugs and it could be hard to debug,” Cohn said.
He added: “As a result, I do not know whether we will be able to publish the needle. There are good reasons to bet against it, though perhaps there are scenarios where things are running super smoothly; alternately, we hit bugs at the start and there’s no chance.”
Either way, we will run the model internally (without publishing it) and we should be able to report findings on NYT through words/charts/screenshots. In all likelihood, I will spend almost no time on X, as words on NYT will need to do the work without an automated product.
— Nate Cohn (@Nate_Cohn) November 5, 2024
The Needle was first used in 2016, when Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton were vying for The White House.
The Needle, according to The Times, considers “two fundamental questions” — “where are the votes that remain to be counted in a particular race, and which candidate is faring better than expected in the results so far?” The Needle then leans on a statistical model to gauge demographic patterns and how voting may continue to go on Election Night. But readers may be waiting until 2028 to see it working in real-time during a presidential election again.
