Predicting the Winner

The history of American elections changed profoundly on the night of November 4, 1952. An outside-the-box approach to predicting winners from early returns with new tools—computers—was launched live and untested on the newest medium for news: television. Like exhibits in a freak show, computers were referred to as “electronic brains” and “mechanical monsters.”

Yet this innovation would help fuel an obsession with numbers as a way of understanding and shaping politics. It would engender controversy down to our own time. And it would herald a future in which the public square would go digital. The gamble was fueled by a crisis of credibility stemming from faulty election-night forecasts four years earlier, in 1948, combined with a lackluster presentation of returns. What transpired in 1952 is a complex tale of responses to innovation, which Ira Chinoy makes understandable via a surprising history of election nights as venues for rolling out new technologies, refining methods of prediction, and providing opportunities for news organizations to shine.

In Predicting the Winner Chinoy tells in detail for the first time the story of the 1952 election night—a night with continuing implications for the way forward from the dramatic events of 2020–21 and for future election nights in the United States.