Election Results Tuesday: How News Organizations Will Call the Midterm Races
On Tuesday night, winners in one of the most closely contested midterm cycles in recent years will be called long before every vote is counted. Reuters explains the machinery behind those calls - and why the callers sometimes have to take one back.
On Tuesday night, newsrooms across the United States will call winners in the midterm elections long before all the votes are counted, Reuters reported Sunday. Most television networks and digital outlets rely on two providers for vote counts: the Associated Press or the election-data firm Decision Desk HQ. Some outlets, including the Wall Street Journal and MS NOW, will rely solely on the AP, while Fox News and CBS News will make their own projections from the AP vote count, exit polls, early-vote totals and their own statistical modeling.
The AP, a nonprofit newsroom, has counted votes in every U.S. election since 1848 and says it will deploy more than 4,000 reporters at county election offices and polling places for the 2026 midterms. It calls a race only when the trailing candidate cannot catch up, using vote totals and estimates of how many votes remain uncounted. Decision Desk HQ collects counts from official state sources - about 80 percent pulled directly from official election websites - and its final projections require unanimous team agreement and a sign-off from its head of data science, Scott Tranter. The first calls will start soon after polls begin to close, first in Indiana and Kentucky at 6 p.m. Eastern, then in Georgia, South Carolina, Vermont and Virginia at 7 p.m.
The calls carry a trust problem. An October poll for the Medill Local News Initiative and the Alliance for Trust in Media found that while more than 60 percent of Americans have some confidence in news organizations to report accurate election results, only 32 percent have high confidence. And the machinery is not infallible: Decision Desk HQ withdrew a projection in the Seattle mayor's race in 2025 and another in a New Jersey special-election primary earlier this year, and the AP retracted a call in California's 21st Congressional District in 2018 after the projected winner fell behind.
