The Times, characteristically, understates the needle’s appeal. It looks at where votes remain to be counted, and makes an educated guess about how those votes will break based on past election results and trends evident in initial returns. Our live forecast is just a formal means to do for online viewers what analysts like Kornacki or King have been doing for television viewers for years. (If you have ever heard a joke on politics Twitter about “crucial Waukesha County,” congratulations, you now understand it, kind of.)īut instead of having a human perform this analysis for the audience, the needle performs it. They then identify the areas to watch where votes haven’t been counted yet where the trailing candidate will need to do particularly well. The Times’s best needle explainer/apologia, from March 2018, compares the needle to the work that political analysts do as the precinct data rolls in.Īs results are tallied, these analysts identify surprises where votes that have already been counted - a larger or smaller than expected turnout in a given area, an unexpectedly strong or weak showing by a particular candidate. The New York Times’s needle is one of those strategies. Instead, media outlets have found a lot of ways to talk about what appears to be happening as vote counts keep rolling in slowly across a district or state. That is the one thing the media cannot provide. The election night audience really only wants to know one thing: the results. And there are tons of people - way more than traditionally pay attention to news on a Tuesday night, or to politics at all - paying attention during those hours. That is fine for print newspapers, but TV and internet outlets have to fill several hours between the closing of the polls and the decision on the final outcome. If control of the House comes down to a handful of races in California, we might not know for weeks.) The needle is a new(ish) solution to a problem that’s existed since the dawn of the election night broadcast: The biggest news story of any Election Day is the outcome of the elections, but we don’t actually know the outcome of the elections until the wee hours of the morning on Wednesday. The New York Times election needle is a way to fill in the dead air of election night with science instead of punditry The needle doesn’t provide a check on that emotion it can merely channel it into partisan joy or equally partisan despair. Election night in America has become an emotionally fraught communal experience. Making predictions is the entire point of watching election night returns live - and getting attached to those predictions is an inevitability for anyone who is watching the returns because they care about the outcome. The Times has continued to tweak its model and display for the needle over the past two years, and to explain ( repeatedly) how exactly the needle works and why you shouldn’t develop too much of an attachment to its predictions.īut it is far, far too late. That image is a screenshot of the needle Vox staff captured on the night of the 2016 presidential election. New York Times screenshot via Libby Nelson/Vox Many people’s memories of the moment they realized Trump was actually going to be America’s 45th president look something like this: This screenshot of the New York Times’s election needle was taken by Vox’s Libby Nelson at 11:15pm Eastern on the night of the 2016 presidential election. Instead of a static certainty born out of polls done before the election, or the slow plodding of a live results page, it jitters constantly as new information comes in - inspiring the confidence in math that one expects from 21st-century political hobbyists, and the violent mood swings of the most hardcore partisan.Ī lot of the emotional response to the needle has to do with the circumstances of its debut: an election that Clinton was heavily favored to win but that Donald Trump managed to pull out, with the needle inexorably tracking the way the candidates’ fortunes changed. It’s appeared five times, and each has inspired waves of excitement and nausea among a certain type of extremely online politics nerd. The needle was born of that Trump-era agita. and when she didn’t, the shock tarnished a lot of liberals’ (and reporters’) faith in polls at all. Of course, this all seemed like a good idea because it seemed like Hillary Clinton was definitely going to win. Nate Silver of FiveThirtyEight and Nate Cohn (who, at the Times, is one of the needle’s masterminds) sniped at each other about the assumptions built into their models everyone got really huffy about correlated errors for a few days. The NYT election needle debuted in 2016, an election cycle in which sophisticated modeling of opinion polls (which went mainstream in 2012) had become so accepted that it seemed totally reasonable to use numbers to predict the future. LIVE Election Results: Control of Congress
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |