NYT ‘Needle’ Predicts 84% Chance of Trump's Victory With 285 Electoral College Votes

New York: As the final result declaring the winner of the US Presidential elections 2024 is still awaited, the famous election result predictor, New York Times’s ‘Needle’, projected an 84 per cent possibility of Donald Trump 's victory with about 295 electoral college votes based on its data at 10.30pm on Tuesday (9am IST, Wednesday).

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

The prognosticator makes longer-range projections beyond those made by other media outlets by combining the incoming polling trends with demographic and historical data.

At 10pm, 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 computers owing to its union of technology workers being on strike over pay and working conditions.

Acknowledging the problem, the newspaper 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. 

On election eve, the newspaper’s poll had given Harris a 3 per cent lead over Trump.