NYT says public may not see political needle on election night

The New York Times’s signature election needle may not be available to the public as results come in Tuesday night amid an ongoing strike by the outlet’s technology staff, the paper’s election analytics team confirmed Tuesday.

The Times’s election night statistical model, dubbed the “Needle,” helps readers understand what to make of the votes that have been counted so far and estimates the outcome based on partial election results.

Publishing the Needle live during election night depends on computer systems managed by the company’s engineers, some of whom are a part of the Times’s Tech Guild currently on strike, the election analytics team said in an update Tuesday morning.

“How we display our election forecast will depend on those systems, as well as incoming data feeds, and we will only publish a live version of the Needle if we are confident those systems are stable,” the update read.

While the model may not be available to the public, the team said Times reporters plan to periodically run the model internally and publish updates to the outlet’s live blog in writing.

The Times first implemented the Needle in 2016, when it was criticized for showing Hillary Clinton with an 80 percent chance of victory over Donald Trump. The feature has since become a staple of the paper’s election coverage.

The Tech Guild, which represents more than 600 software developers and other employees who support the back end of digital systems, went on strike Monday, after it was unable to come to a contract agreement with Times management.

The workers are advocating for a “just cause” provision in their contract, meaning employees can be terminated only for misconduct or another such reason; pay increases and pay equity; and return-to-office policies, according to the Times.

Nate Cohn, the paper’s chief political analyst, said the Tech Guild does not play a role in the model itself but built and maintains the infrastructure that gives the Needle the necessary data.

“This is true of everything on the nyt (including our results pages), but the needle is a huge data load, it's more brittle, and we've only published it a handful of times (v 1000s of results pages). There will be bugs and it could be hard to debug,” Cohn wrote on the social platform X “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,” he added.

In addition to the live blog, journalists may report their findings through charts or screenshots, Cohn said.

The Hill reached out to the Tech Guild and the Times for comment.

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NYT says public may not see political needle on election night

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