Today, pollsters predict elections based not on a single poll or early returns, but rather on an amalgamation of many polls, plus other data. The methodological sophistication and advanced computer programs used today were not available. Most notably, telephone polling was in its infancy in 1948. I will never in my life forget spending Election Night watching the needle on the New York Times’ prediction meter move from strongly favoring Clinton to 100% Trump.Ĭomparisons to the classic “Dewey Defeats Truman” headline of 1948 are inevitable, but several differences emerge. The news media and even Saturday Night Live took Clinton’s victory for granted. I joined numerous colleagues in assuming a Hillary Clinton victory. For political scientists, our “what the…?” moment involves the failure of most public-opinion polls to predict the results of the 2016 election. But we also think that the millions of people who follow election night results online ought to have the context to understand them as well as experts do.As I write, Donald Trump is less than two weeks from being inaugurated as President of the United States. The question is: What service does the needle provide? The Times tries to anticipate critics of its decision to use the election needle for the Iowa caucus by writing: “For those who wonder whether the world really needs the election needle, we realize the actual results will emerge soon enough. As election night 2016 wore on, the Times needle, as promised, swung slowly, then rapidly, toward Trump’s name as he marched to victory. None of this is to say the projections or the needle were wrong, even if the underlying polls were. “They call it 538 because that’s the number of times you check it each hour,” the writer Susan Orlean tweeted on the eve of the 2016 election. Trump can’t win, this thinking went, because the polling averages and projections still show Hillary Clinton on the way to victory. Whether intended to or not, those averages became safety blankets for anxious readers to cling to in the run-up to the election. The 2016 election saw the rise of daily polling averages and projection journalism, led largely by the Times and Nate Silver’s FiveThirtyEight. It’s human nature to seek out information that helps make sense of the unknowable. One question political reporters and editors could have weighed in a post-2016 reckoning was whether the growing fixation with prediction and projection serves readers and citizens. But because of that, Rosen adds, “you don’t have any real inquiry into what went wrong.” In this case, the next story was one whose importance couldn’t be understated: the presidency of Donald Trump. ) “It’s like a law of nature that you just move on to the next story,” Jay Rosen, an NYU professor and widely read media critic, recently told me. (Props to HuffPost for doing something like this. No industry-wide listening tour to hear from readers and voters. No 9/11 Commission for political journalism. There was no such reckoning after Trump’s election. You’d think that a moment like that one would have prompted a period of self-reflection, a genuine attempt to understand how we missed the story and how to improve upon the ways we cover the next election. The return of the needle is another sign that, as we kick off a presidential primary with massive stakes for the country, political journalism still hasn’t learned the lessons of 2016.įour years ago, the political class - which includes many journalists - was humbled by the election of Donald Trump. And the moment the outcome is announced, the Times’ needles will be rendered obsolete. No, the piece of information readers want more than anything on election night is who won the election. The Times is reviving the needle for Iowa, its reporters explain, because it “gives many readers the piece of information they want more than anything else on election night: It tells them who is on track to win the election.” You probably remember the Times’ needle from the 2016 election. The paper announced Monday it would be rolling out not one but four different needles to project and predict the results of the Iowa caucus. WASHINGTON - Back by unpopular demand is the New York Times’ election-night needle.
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