The News

 A November surprise in the arcane art of decision desk election calls arrived Tuesday morning as The New York Times wrote that the Needle is back — but only if the tech support behind it works.

The predictive tool, widely ridiculed after flopping back and forth in the 2016 presidential race and underestimating Donald Trump’s chances, never really went away. After some refinements, it accurately called a volatile Senate race in Alabama in 2017 and has been deployed in primaries and general elections since.

The key distinction from other election winner-loser calls is that the Needle offers real-time probability estimates well before a definitive result is available. The two main election data services — AP VoteCast and Edison Research — wait until they are virtually certain who won, in this contentious year more than ever.

Associated Press executive editor Julie Pace told me in an interview several months ago that the massive VoteCast operation absolutely will not speculate on a winner until that certainty threshold is met. (Clients may choose to give their own commentators more leeway.)

Both the Times story Tuesday morning and an X thread at noontime by chief political analyst Nate Cohn offered a qualifier. With Times Tech Guild staffers on strike, it could prove hard to impossible to correct glitches. Worst case, a live version of the Needle will not be published.

“If we are not able to stream the Needle’s results live, our journalists plan to run its statistical model periodically, examine its output and publish updates in our live blog about what they see — giving our readers a sense of where the race actually stands over the course of the night,” the Times wrote in an explainer.

Cohn addressed the probabilities in his post: “I do not know whether we will be able to publish the Needle. There are good reasons to bet against it, though perhaps there are scenarios where things are running super smoothly; alternately, we hit bugs at the start, and there’s no chance.”

Access to the Needle and other coverage will be free, at least at first.

In the aftermath of the 2016 setback, the Times said the Needle was not wrong, just misunderstood. A confusion then, which Tuesday’s story addresses, is that if the Needle is showing a 75% chance a candidate will win, that also means there is a one in four chance she will lose.

Not a complicated concept if explained. My guess is that it is all the more understandable in 2024 as legalized sports betting has taken off. A popular feature of sports wagering is to allow bets as a game is in progress and the odds change.

Even news consumers who are not gamblers may find the Needle a good source to watch, assuming it overcomes tech challenges and gets airborne. It’s a supplement to what you will be seeing on the national networks and other papers that are playing by the AP or Edison Research rules.

New York Times spokesman Charlie Stadtlander mildly disputed my odds reference in an email: “It’s not correct to frame it as ‘oddsmaking,’ but rather properly contextualizing the data coming in from returns. … The purpose of the Needle is to put election results in proper context as they come in. Early returns are often very misleading; the first votes counted often differ substantially from those that remain.”

Here are some other notes on upcoming decision calls before the counts kick off:

Transparency: AP’s Pace has told me and other interviewers that the biggest change this cycle is doubling down on transparency — offering more and longer explainers of methodology.

The Washington Post and The Wall Street Journal followed that example in the last week with pieces on how they will be making calls. I learned from the Post that its editors see a particular benefit in VoteCast spotting errors in the torrent of incoming information and quickly correcting them. The Post also invests in an extra dose of data by subscribing to Edison’s product as well as the AP’s.

Independence: A complication of the system is that editors form a middle layer between the data providers and those announcing decision calls on air or on websites. So an AP client (Fox News in 2020 was an example) might choose to make a call earlier or later than AP itself.

The vendors and some of the network data desks work in isolation from the rest of election night reporting, sometimes literally in a closed-off room. Many commentators on a left- or right-leaning network can be counted to spin incoming results in favor of their side. The decision operations can steer clear of that. Hence the Arizona drama in 2020 where Fox News called the state for Biden well before left-leaning or middle-of-the-road outlets did.

AP Unfiltered: AP is the most frequent source for calls, in statewide and local races as well as the presidency, and is typically credited. An alternative for those who want to see just what AP is saying at the moment is to go directly to the wire service’s own site, apnews.com.

A different Decision Desk: There is an alternative to the big two providers, descriptively called Decision Desk HQ. It is an established but smaller firm boasting an eclectic client base including The Economist, The 19th and newish NewsNation network. Decision Desk can offer one more view of the state of play for channel-hoppers.

Number nerds like me who want more detail on the process may want to check out some of these links early in the evening before the cascade of updated state-by-state totals takes the stage and makes all the noise.

Poynter media business reporter Angela Fu and Poynter contributor Nicole Slaughter Graham contributed to this report.

 It’s been considered one of the greatest public health achievements of the 20th century: by putting a small amount of fluoride in the water supply, public health officials have prevented millions of cavities, saved tens of billions of dollars in dental costs, and made children healthier.

But in a post on X on Saturday, former presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr. said one of his first acts as an official in a new Trump administration would be to “advise all U.S. water systems to remove fluoride from public water.” He went on to list several false statements about the effects of fluoride and then linked to a video on a website founded by prominent anti-vaccine advocate and conspiracy theorist Del Bigtree.

Former President Donald Trump appeared receptive to the idea of nixing fluoride from the water supply. “Well, I haven’t talked to him about it yet, but it sounds OK to me,” Trump said Sunday in a telephone interview with NBC. “You know, it’s possible.”

Experts were swift to condemn the promise to remove fluoride from the water. “Fluoride has been well tested. It clearly and definitively decreases cavities, and is not associated with any clear evidence of the chronic diseases mentioned in that tweet,” says Dr. Paul Offit, a researcher and physician at Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia.

Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is a science denialist. He makes up his own scientific truths and ignores the actual truths,” Offit says.

Fluoride has clear benefits

The science is unambiguous — adding fluoride to the water supply has been effective in lowering the number of cavities in both children and adults. Fluoride works to restore minerals to teeth that are lost when bacteria grow rapidly inside the mouth, particularly after consuming sugary snacks.

More than a dozen recent studies from governments and academic institutions around the world have found that fluoride reduces tooth decay in children and adults by around 25%, according to the American Dental Association. It is particularly beneficial for those in lower-income families who may not have access to fluoride products, such as toothpastes and mouth rinses. A study by the Colorado School of Public Health found that adding fluoride to the water saved roughly $6.8 billion in dental expenses in one year alone.

In recent years, some studies have suggested that high levels of fluoride might cause lower IQ in children. A recent government review found moderate evidence for the effect, but not at the levels currently used in U.S. drinking water. The ADA says that the benefits of fluoridation continue to outweigh any possible risks.

Stark contrasts

Dr. Amanda Stroud is a dentist who sees the effects of fluoride — and its absence — every day in her job working as dental director at a health nonprofit in western North Carolina. AppHealth serves kids who have fluoridated city water and others who have well water that has no fluoride. The differences are stark, she says.

The children who are drinking water that has fluoride, she says, often have a good, solid set of teeth without cavities. They can take smiling and eating without pain for granted, “which is a joyful thing at that age,” Stroud says.

When children are drinking well water, it’s a different story. “They could possibly have decay on every tooth,” she says. “When they smile, they could possibly have teeth broken down to the gum line. Their teeth are appearing brown or mottled.”

And that is a painful condition that makes brushing and eating healthy foods like fruits and vegetables more difficult. “It's heartbreaking,” she says.

The original public health conspiracy theory

Despite the clear benefits, conspiracy theories around fluoride have existed for almost as long as the water has been fluorinated, according to Matthew Dallek, a political historian at the George Washington University.

“In a way the conspiracy theory about fluoride in the drinking water is one of the original public health conspiracy theories,” he says.

Fluoride was first introduced in 1945 in Grand Rapids, Michigan, which also happens to be the Trump campaign's last rally site before Election Day.

Putting fluoride in water quickly spread around the country once the benefits were clear in Grand Rapids.

But right from the start, wild theories about the chemical were circulating. “It served as an almost perfect conspiracy theory,” he explains. Fluoride was unseen, mandated by the government, and present in tap water, a substance that pretty much everyone was ingesting.

Bernard “Bernie” Marcus, the billionaire Home Depot cofounder and a Republican megadonor, who in recent years became an outspoken supporter of former President Donald Trump, has died, the company announced Tuesday. He was 95.

“The entire Home Depot family is deeply saddened by the death of our cofounder Bernie Marcus,” The Home Depot said in a statement. “We owe an immeasurable debt of gratitude to Bernie.”

Marcus, who had a net worth of about $7.4 billion, according to Bloomberg’s Billionaire Index, gained his fortune from establishing The Home Depot with Arthur Blank in 1978. The duo grew the orange-clad hardware store into a retail behemoth that now has 2,300 stores and a stock market valuation of nearly $400 billion.

Born in 1929 in Newark, New Jersey, to Russian Jewish immigrants, Marcus was the youngest of four siblings. He earned his degree in merchandising and marketing at Rutgers University and went into the retailing industry working for various chains.

He met Blank when they worked at Handy Dan Home Improvement, a chain in California. They both were fired after new management came in, so the duo hatched a plan to start a new chain that was bigger than traditional hardware stores with better-trained staff. Then, the Home Depot was born.

Marcus was Home Depot’s CEO until 1997 and served as the company’s chairman until his retirement in 2002.

The Home Depot got its start in Atlanta, a city where Marcus was a well-known philanthropist with his wife Billi. The pair started the Marcus Autism Center at Emory University, which helps kids with developmental disabilities.

Marcus has also donated to several charities, Jewish and medical organizations, in addition to a $250 million grant that helped opened the famous Georgia Aquarium in 2005.

“He was a master merchant and a retail visionary. But even more importantly, he valued our associates, customers and communities above all,” the company said. “He’s left us with an invaluable legacy and the backbone of our company: our values.”

An outspoken Republican, Marcus has donated millions of dollars to the campaigns of right-wing politicians, including the late John McCain, current Florida governor Ron DeSantis and Trump.

Later in his life, he frequently made appearances on right-wing television shows on Fox News and Fox Business, often talking about his support of Trump’s presidential aspirations. Some Trump opponents attempted to launch a boycott of The Home Depot in 2016 and in 2019 because of Marcus’ support of the Republican nominee for president.

Marcus also said in 2022 in an interview with the Financial Times that he was “worried about capitalism” and that because of what he called the spread of “socialism” in America, “nobody works. Nobody gives a damn. ‘Just give it to me. Send me money. I don’t want to work — I’m too lazy, I’m too fat, I’m too stupid.’”

“We used to have free speech here. We don’t have it,” Marcus told the newspaper. “The woke people have taken over the world. You know, I imagine today they can’t attack me. I’m 93. Who gives a crap about Bernie Marcus?”