New York Times “Needle” election forecast launches amid tech strike

The New York Times needle lives on: The paper's popular election forecast indicator returned Tuesday evening, despite the ongoing strike called on Monday by the union representing the paper's tech employees.

First introduced in 2016, the NY Times Needle estimates the final result of an election based on partial election results. As more results come in, the needle changes to indicate the likelihood of a given race's final outcome – with “tossup” in the middle position and gradations marked “lean,” “likely” and “very likely” on either side and Republican candidates.

“The Needle is live!” Nate Cohn, the Times’ senior political analyst, wrote in an update to the site around 8:22 p.m. ET. “Our election night forecast shows an extremely close race. As expected, almost all of the votes counted so far indicate a very close election.”

The needle for the US presidential race between Vice President Kamala Harris and Donald Trump with real-time predictions is available at this link.

In an article on its website, the Times said the Needle may not have appeared given the strike. “Needle’s live release on election night relies on computer systems maintained by engineers across the company, including some who are currently on strike,” the paper said. “How we present our election forecast depends on these systems as well as the incoming data feeds, and we will only release a live version of the Needle when we are confident that these systems are stable.”

On Monday, the Times Tech Guild, which represents more than 600 of the newspaper's engineers, data managers, designers, software developers and technical staff, said it had gone on strike after failing to secure a new contract with the New York Times Times Co. to reach “multiple rounds of intensive negotiations.” The NewsGuild of New York-affiliated union accused the company of unfair labor practices. A company spokesman said The New York Times Co. “continues to work with the Tech Guild to reach a fair contract that recognizes that they are already among the highest paid individual employees in the company and journalism is our top priority.”

The union prominently featured the needle in its X-Monday post announcing the strike – it pointed the needle all the way to the right and predicted a “100 percent chance of a work stoppage”:

According to the union, this is the first strike to coincide with a presidential election at the NewsGuild since the Detroit newspaper strike in 1964.

The Times said in its article explaining how the Needle works that the feature does not use AI but rather “uses statistical modeling and other techniques.”

“One of our principles is that journalists should always understand what the Needle is doing and why. “There is a team of journalists reviewing the data going in and out of the model at every point on election night,” the paper said. “If the journalists responsible for the Needle have to sleep before the race is called, the Needle will also be paused.”