How US News Organizations Will Make Midterm Race Calls on Election Night
When winners are called on Tuesday night, most outlets will be working from just two vote counts — the Associated Press or Decision Desk HQ — and calling a race only when the trailing candidate cannot catch up, in one of the most closely contested midterm cycles in recent years.
On Tuesday night, newsrooms across the United States will call winners in one of the country's most closely contested midterm election cycles in recent years, long before all the votes are counted, according to the Reuters explainer published Sunday and read in full this cycle. Most television networks and digital outlets rely on two providers for vote counts: the Associated Press or the election-data firm Decision Desk HQ. The Wall Street Journal and MS NOW will rely solely on the AP for race calls, while Fox News and CBS News will make their own projections based on the AP vote count, exit polls, early-vote totals and their own statistical modeling, per Reuters.
The machinery behind the calls is large and old. The AP, a nonprofit newsroom supported by member newspapers, has counted votes in every U.S. election since 1848, and said it would deploy more than 4,000 reporters at county election offices and polling locations for the 2026 midterms, gathering data for the decision desks at ABC News, CBS News, Fox, CNN and NBC News, per Reuters. The AP calls a race only when the trailing candidate cannot catch up, estimating how many votes remain uncounted from past voting patterns and early-vote data. Decision Desk HQ collects counts from official state sources, says roughly 80 percent of votes are processed by pulling data directly from official election websites or monitoring them manually, and requires unanimous team agreement plus a sign-off from its head of data science, Scott Tranter, for final projections, per Reuters.
The calls carry a trust problem into Tuesday. More than 60 percent of Americans have some confidence in news organizations to report accurate election results, but only 32 percent have high confidence, with Democrats more trusting than Republicans, according to an October poll for the Medill Local News Initiative and the Alliance for Trust in Media cited by Reuters. Retractions are rare but real: Decision Desk HQ withdrew a projection in the 2025 Seattle mayor's race and another earlier this year in a New Jersey special-election primary, and the AP retracted a 2018 California congressional call when the trailing candidate took the lead, per Reuters. The first calls Tuesday start soon after polls begin closing, first in Indiana and Kentucky at 6 p.m. Eastern. Texas polls close at 7 p.m. Central.
