![]() 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 ![]()
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