How Election Week 2022 Went Down

Though the New York Times Needle is live, please promise us that you’ll come back to FiveThirtyEight after you check it. It shows the Senate as a tossup — although if I’m squinting at it correctly, Democrats are ever-so-slight favorites — while Republicans have a 76 percent chance of winning the House.

Adding onto Nathaniel’s answer, the Needle is a model that considers the votes that have already been counted, which precincts/counties those counted votes came from and estimates or predictions for the remaining votes. It’s not going to tell us the future, but it’s a clear way of visualizing what we (and namely, the New York Times) very well might see.

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.