The needle did its job: It swung swiftly when votes from Midwestern battleground states began to be counted. It gave Mr. Trump the edge in Pennsylvania, even when Mrs. Clinton had a double-digit lead in the state. It performed exactly as we had hoped and, frankly, if more readers and journalists were conservatives, they would have seen it just as they saw it in Alabama: as the leading indicator of a thrilling upset.

With that history, do we really want to risk being “wrong” in a lower-profile special election?

Right or wrong, we’re doing it anyway.

Why the Needle

Incomplete election results are often deeply unrepresentative. That was certainly the case in Alabama. The state’s predominantly white, rural and Republican counties were among the first to report, giving Mr. Moore a big but unsustainable lead.

Many sophisticated analysts would have recognized that Mr. Jones was poised to close the gap. Television viewers might have gotten a sense of Mr. Jones’s route to victory from on-air analysts like MSNBC’s Steve Kornacki or CNN’s John King, who pointed to the remaining Democratic vote in Montgomery and Birmingham. Network decision desks certainly knew: They have their own internal forecasts, which will probably compete with the needle one day, perhaps even as soon as this year’s midterm elections. Maybe they’ll put the needle out of business.

Online viewers looking at a traditional election results page, on the other hand, would have had no idea, unless they knew Alabama’s political geography well enough to figure it out for themselves.

Our live forecast is just a formal means to do for online viewers what analysts like Mr. Kornacki or Mr. King have been doing for television viewers for years. It looks at where votes remain to be counted, and makes an educated guess about how those votes will break based on past election results and trends evident in initial returns.

There is an argument that all of this is a waste of time: After all, we’ll know the actual result soon enough. We are sympathetic to that idea, but if people are going to follow election night results online — and they do, by the millions — they ought to have the context to understand them. In 2016, that meant letting readers know Mr. Trump was an overwhelming favorite as soon as we knew.