How Will Midterm Winners Be Called on Tuesday Night? Inside the AP and Decision Desk Counts
When Duval County's polls close at 7 p.m. Tuesday, the winners viewers see called will come from two vote-counting operations — the Associated Press and Decision Desk HQ — and a rule both follow: call a race only when the trailing candidate cannot catch up.
On Tuesday night, newsrooms across the United States will call winners in one of the country's most closely contested midterm cycles, 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 and the election-data firm Decision Desk HQ.
Some outlets, including the Wall Street Journal and MS NOW, will rely solely on the AP for race calls, while Fox News and CBS News make their own projections from the AP vote count, exit polls, early-vote totals and their own statistical modeling. The first calls start as polls begin to close — Indiana and Kentucky at 6 p.m. Eastern, then Georgia, South Carolina, Vermont and Virginia at 7 p.m., the same hour Duval County's polls close — and in some races a call can be instant if most voting has already taken place.
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 these midterms, feeding the decision desks at ABC, CBS, Fox, CNN and NBC, which also use exit-polling firm SSRS, the successor to Edison Research. The AP calls a race only when the trailing candidate cannot catch up, estimating the votes still uncounted from past patterns and early-vote data. Decision Desk HQ collects counts from official state sources — usually secretaries of state — checks official election websites automatically for about 80 percent of votes, and requires unanimous team agreement and a sign-off from its head of data science, Scott Tranter, before a final projection.
Calls can be wrong, though retractions are rare: Decision Desk HQ withdrew a Seattle mayor's projection in 2025 and a New Jersey special-election primary call earlier this year, and the AP retracted a California House call in 2018 after the trailing candidate took the lead. The machinery runs under public skepticism — an October poll for the Medill Local News Initiative and the Alliance for Trust in Media found more than 60 percent of Americans have some confidence in news organizations to report accurate election results, but only 32 percent have high confidence. For Jacksonville voters, the practical takeaway is simple: a called race on Tuesday night is a statistical judgment by one of these two operations, not a certified result — Florida's official results come later, from the state and its 67 county supervisors of elections.
