It was right before Halloween, with Election Day a little more than a week away, and Emily Nussbaum, The New Yorker’s television critic, “made the scariest costume I could think of,” she tweeted. On a large piece of white cardboard dangling from her neck with string, Nussbaum had drawn a picture of The New York Times’s election needle, an interactive feature that famously traumatized Times readers. “That’s gonna trigger Brooklyn,” CNN’s Jake Tapper replied. “TOO SCARY EMILY,” agreed journalist Lauren Duca.

The needle, which debuted with Trump vs. Clinton, is a symbol of the speed with which political hopes can be upended, as well as the maddening uncertainty of polling—and liberals are still deeply haunted by it. On November 8, 2016, the Times’s pre-election data initially showed Hillary Clinton with an 85 percent chance of victory. That prediction was based on the Times’s internal aggregation of all the credible polls heading into the homestretch of the race. In the days and hours leading up to the earliest returns, the 85 percent figure was featured heavily in Times news coverage and on the home page. Additionally, it provided the starting point for the needle—also prominently displayed on nytimes.com—which began the night tilting reassuringly toward the blue end of the forecast dial.

For anyone anxious about the possibility of a Donald Trump presidency, however fantastical it still seemed at that point, looking at the needle was as calming as a hit of Xanax. But as the hours went by, more and more of the real-time polling-station data upon which the needle was based flowed forth, and the perpetually quivering device began to swing wildly, veering further and further into the red. If at first it had been a balm, the needle was now a nightmare vision—a living, breathing representation of the Establishment’s failure to comprehend just how powerfully Trump’s gospel had resonated with 62,984,828 members of the electorate. It was also a cold, hard reality check on the conventional wisdom and polling acumen of the coastal classes. It was as if the needle itself had proudly announced that a bawdy real-estate magnate and former host of The Apprentice was about to become America’s 45th president.

At the Times, Trump’s election engendered a period of soul-searching, and the centrality of the needle in the paper’s online coverage became a contentious issue. What did it mean that the needle, mathematically sound as it was, had ended up so far away from that original 85 percent? “In the minds of some people,” Times managing editor Joe Kahn told me, “everything is the needle. The poll of polls is the needle. The real-time results are the needle. But really, the model around the needle is based on intensive, precinct-by-precinct data.” The needle also appeared to signify a gap between a set of newer, next-generation Times employees who were visibly distressed over Trump’s win, and the journalistic stoicism of the paper’s old guard. “When the needle started twitching toward Trump, you could tell who was watching, because they were the ones who started getting distraught,” one editor recalled. “There were people crying in the newsroom that night.”

On Tuesday, the needle will be back for its biggest showing since 2016—but not without some rethinking. “We had many, many discussions,” said Kahn, who noted that he, executive editor Dean Baquet, and the political editors “all agreed that aggregating polls and then coming out with what looks like a New York Times-endorsed summary, and then placing that too prominently on the home page”—and making that probability the starting point for the needle—“was not the right thing to do, so we’re not going to repeat that.”