New York Times ‘Needle’ Election Predictor Launches Amid Tech Workers Union Strike

The New York Times’ Needle lives: The newspaper’s popular election-prediction gauge made its return on Tuesday night — despite the ongoing strike called Monday by the union representing tech employees at the paper.

The NY Times’ Needle, first introduced in 2016, estimates the final outcome of an election based on partial election results. As more results come in, the Needle changes to signal the likelihood of the final outcome of a given race — with “tossup” at the center position and gradations marked “lean,” “likely” and “very likely” on either side for the Democratic and Republican candidates.

“The Needle is live!” Nate Cohn, the Times’ chief political analyst, wrote in an update at about 8:22 p.m. ET on the site. “Our election night forecast shows an extremely close race. Almost all of the vote counted so far points toward a very close election, as anticipated.”

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The Needle for the U.S. presidential race between VP Kamala Harris and Donald Trump showing real-time predictions is available at this link.

In an article on its website, the Times said the Needle could have been a no-show given the strike. “Publishing the Needle live 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 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.”

On Monday, the Times Tech Guild, which represents more than 600 engineers, data managers, designers, software developers and tech personnel at the paper, announced they had gone on strike after failing to reach a new contract with the New York Times Co. after “multiple rounds of intense bargaining.” The union, affiliated with the NewsGuild of New York, accused the company of unfair labor practices. A company spokesperson said the New York Times Co. was “continuing to work with the Tech Guild to reach a fair contract that takes into account that they are already among the highest-paid individual contributors in the company and journalism is our top priority.”

The union prominently featured the Needle in its post on X Monday announcing the strike — showing the needle all the way to right predicting a “100% chance of a work stoppage”:

According to the union, it’s the first strike to coincide with a presidential election in the NewsGuild since the 1964 Detroit newspaper strike.

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

“One of our principles is that journalists should understand what the Needle is doing, and why, at all times. There is a team of journalists reviewing the data that comes in and goes out of the model at all times on election night,” the paper says. “If the journalists responsible for the Needle must sleep before the race is called, the Needle will be paused as well.”