Why the Election Needle Got It Right but Felt So Wrong
It’s just a tool, they said. But really, the needle is a metaphor.
I wrote yesterday in defense of the New York Times’ election needle, the maligned data visualization that anxiety-ridden election-watchers can’t stop refreshing, no matter how hard they try. (You can find it here, probably still quivering away, should you so dare.) As penance for confessing my deeply unpopular opinion — which only grew more unpopular on the left as election night wore on and the needles pointed stubbornly toward Trump — I have been assigned to perform a brief postmortem on its performance in the cold light of the morning after.
With the caveat that votes are still being counted and key races hang in the balance, the needle appears to have largely accomplished the task the Times set out for it and probably better than most other information sources tasked with the same job. That job, as the Times defined it, was to give an up-to-the-minute picture of who appeared more likely to win in three specific state-level races: Florida, Georgia, and…
