How Election Week 2022 Went Down

Chad, I’m a fan of the Needle! It’s essentially a much more efficient, computerized way of doing what we election analysts do when we say, “Warnock is doing X in Fulton County, and that’s above/below what he needs to win.” In general, I think it’s reliable, but the one thing I hope they figured out is how to handle the differences between mail and in-person votes. Mail votes obviously skew Democratic, and in-person votes obviously skew Republican, and you have to know which one you’re looking at before saying a certain vote total in a certain county is good for Democrats or Republicans.

The New York Times’s infamous “Needle” is live. It is a live forecast of what’s to come for the rest of election night, and as of this writing, it is saying the Senate is a toss-up and the House “probably” going into Republican control. Does anyone have any tips for readers about how best to understand what the Needle can and can’t tell us?

Kaleigh, you just mentioned a number of election deniers who are projected to win in Florida and Alabama, and they all happened to be women. As we’ve written for the site, women elected officials in the GOP historically tended to be more moderate than their male counterparts. But the current political environment has led moderate women to opt out of politics, so the Republican women that run (or get through their primaries) are as extreme as the men in their party.