A November surprise in the arcane art of election calling via the decision office arrived Tuesday morning when The New York Times wrote that the Needle is back — but only if the tech support behind it works.

The predictive tool, which was widely ridiculed after it floundered in the 2016 presidential race and underestimated Donald Trump’s chances, never really went away. After some refinements, it was rightly called a volatile Senate race in Alabama in 2017 and has since been used in primaries and general elections.

The main difference from other winner-loser calls is that the Needle provides real-time probability estimates long before a final result is available. The two major election data services – AP VoteCast and Edison Research – are waiting until they know almost certainly who won, more than ever in this controversial year.

Associated Press Editor-in-Chief Julie Pace told me in an interview several months ago that the massive VoteCast operation absolutely will not speculate on a winner until that certainty threshold is reached. (Customers can choose to give their own commenters more leeway.)

Both Tuesday morning’s Times story and a midday X-thread from chief political analyst Nate Cohn offered a qualifier. With Times Tech Guild employees on strike, correcting glitches may prove difficult to impossible. In the worst case, a live version of the Needle will not be published.

“If we can’t live stream the Needle results, our journalists plan to run the statistical model periodically, examine its results and post updates in our live blog about what they’re seeing – giving our readers a sense of where the race actually takes place. during the night,” the Times wrote in an explanation.

Cohn addressed the probabilities in his post: “I don’t know if we can publish the Needle. There are good reasons to bet against it, although there may be scenarios where things go super smoothly; Alternately we encountered bugs in the beginning, and there is no chance.

Access to the Needle and other coverage will be free at least initially.

In the wake of the 2016 setback, the Times said the Needle was not wrong, just misunderstood. One confusion addressed in Tuesday’s story is that if the Needle shows a 75% chance that a candidate will win, it also means there is a one-in-four chance that she will lose.

Not a complicated concept when explained. I suspect it’s all the more understandable in 2024, now that legalized sports betting has taken off. A popular feature of sports betting is allowing bets to be placed while the game is in progress and the odds are changing.

Even news consumers who aren’t gamblers might find the Needle a good source to watch, assuming it overcomes the technical challenges and takes to the air. It’s in addition to what you’ll see on the national networks and other newspapers that adhere to AP or Edison Research rules.

New York Times spokesperson Charlie Stadtlander mildly disputed my odds reference in an email: “It’s not correct to frame it as ‘oddsmaking,’ but rather to properly frame the data coming in from returns to contextualize. … The purpose of the Needle is to put election results into context as they come in. Early returns are often very misleading; the first votes counted are often significantly different from those that remain.”

Here are some other notes on upcoming decision calls before the counts begin:

Transparency: AP’s Pace told me and other interviewers that the biggest change in this cycle is doubling down on transparency – offering more and longer explanations of the methodology.

The Washington Post and The Wall Street Journal followed suit last week with pieces about how they will make calls. I learned from the Post that editors see a particular benefit in VoteCast spotting errors in the flood of incoming information and quickly correcting them. The Post is also investing in an extra dose of data by subscribing to both Edison’s and the AP’s products.

Independence: A complication of the system is that editors form a middle layer between the data providers and those who announce decision calls over the air or on websites. An AP client (Fox News in 2020 was an example) could therefore choose to call earlier or later than AP itself.

The vendors and some network data desks work in isolation from the rest of the election night coverage, sometimes literally in a locked room. It can be expected that many commentators in a left- or right-leaning network will spin incoming results in their side’s favor. The decision operations can stay away from that. Hence the drama in Arizona in 2020, in which Fox News called the state for Biden well before left-wing or middle-of-the-road channels did.

AP unfiltered: AP is the most common source for calls, both in state and local races and for the presidency, and is usually credited. An alternative for those who want to see what exactly AP is saying right now is to go directly to the news service’s own site, apnews.com.

Another decision-making agency: There is an alternative to the two major providers, descriptively called Decision Desk HQ. It is an established but smaller company with an eclectic client base including The Economist, The 19th and the new NewsNation network. Decision Desk can still provide an idea of ​​the state of affairs for channel hoppers.

Numbers nerds like me who want more details about the process might want to check out some of these links early this evening before the cascade of updated state-by-state totals hits the stage and causes all the noise.

Poynter media business reporter Angela Fu and Poynter employee Nicole Slaughter Graham contributed to this report.

This article has been updated to include a quote from a New York Times spokesperson and to note that the Needle will be free to readers.