The most hated feature of 2016's election-night prognostications, the New York Times' ever-wobbling forecast needles were thought to be consigned to history. But they announced that they're bringing them back to fully maximize readers' anxiety and anguish as the evening progresses.
"The needle is making its way to the internet. It'll open with Biden favored by the margin of the polls," writes Nate Cohn, "and it's based on absolutely nothing except the polls."
Embedded above, the needles as of 7:20 p.m. eastern time, based on reported votes so far.
(The reason people hate them is because vote reporting is not like the score in a football match: it's like if you randomly reported goals rather than in the sequence they came in. The hate needles editorialize the vote-counting process by depicting them as an organic back-and-forth race)
