On Tuesday night, newsrooms across the US 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.
Most television networks and digital outlets rely on two providers for vote counts: the Associated Press or election-data firm Decision Desk HQ.
Some news outlets such as the Wall Street Journal and MS NOW will rely solely on the AP for race calls, while others like 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.
The first calls will start soon after polls begin to close in the United States, first with Indiana and Kentucky at 6 p.m. ET (23:00 GMT), and shortly after in Georgia, South Carolina, Vermont and Virginia at 7 p.m. (00:00 GMT on November 4). In certain races there may be an instant call if much of the voting has already taken place.
Low public trust complicates race calls for news outlets. While more than 60 per cent of Americans have some confidence in news organisations to report accurate election results, only 32 per cent have high confidence, with Democrats more trusting than Republicans, an October poll for the Medill Local News Initiative and the Alliance for Trust in Media found.
While most of the major TV networks all use the same AP vote count tabulation to make their calls, the ones who decide to call winners use a proprietary mix of their own data analysis, historical models, exit poll interviews and expert judgment to call races when they determine that they’ve become a statistical certainty.
