NYT ‘Needle’ points to Trump win with projection of 285 electoral college votes

The 'Needle' swings as the data that comes in is analysed in real-time and makes the projection it considers valid at that time

New York: The famous election prognosticator, New York Times’s ‘Needle’, was projecting an 84 per cent chance of a Donald Trump victory with about 295 electoral college votes based on its data at 10:30 p.m. Tuesday (9 a.m. Wednesday in India).

The ‘Needle’ swings as the data that comes in is analysed in real-time and makes the projection it considers valid at that time. A little before 10 p.m., it showed Trump at nearly 290 seats before swinging down five to 285 at 10 p.m. and rising 30 minutes later to 295.

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The ‘Needle’ makes longer-range projections beyond those made by The Associated Press and networks like NBC and Fox News by combining the incoming polling trends with demographic and historical data.

At 10 p.m., the electoral college votes that have been called by the media were 198 for Trump to 112 for Kamala Harris. The New York Times was struggling with its computer systems because its union of technology workers was on strike over pay and working conditions.

The newspaper acknowledged the problem and wrote, “Publishing the Needle live on election night relies on computer systems maintained by engineers across the company, including some who are currently on strike.”

“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, it said.It is confident of the system’s ability to handle the projections.

On the eve of the election, the newspaper’s poll had given Harris a 3 per cent lead over Trump. The RealClear Polling’s aggregation had Trump with a 0.6 per cent lead, which is a virtual tie.