How Election Night Race Calls Will Work on Tuesday, From the AP's 4,000 Reporters to the Networks' Decision Desks
When a winner flashes on the screen Tuesday night, it will not be a guess. Reuters explains the machinery behind the calls: the AP's national vote count, Decision Desk HQ, and the networks' own decision teams — and why a call only comes 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 in recent years, long before all the votes are counted, Reuters reports. Most television networks and digital outlets rely on two providers for the underlying vote count: the Associated Press or the election-data firm Decision Desk HQ. Some outlets, such as the Wall Street Journal and MS NOW, will rely solely on the AP for race calls, while others, including Fox News and CBS News, make their own projections based on the AP vote count, exit polls, early-vote totals and their own statistical modeling.
The AP is a nonprofit newsroom that has counted votes in every U.S. election since 1848, and for the 2026 midterms it says it will deploy more than 4,000 reporters at county election offices and local polling locations, gathering and providing data to the decision desks at ABC News, CBS News, Fox, CNN and NBC News. The method is deliberately conservative: the AP uses vote totals and estimates how many votes remain uncounted based on past voting patterns and early-vote data, and it calls a race only when the trailing candidate cannot catch up. Fox's decision desk makes its own calls in all statewide races as well as the calls for control of the House and the Senate, and final projections require unanimous team agreement.
For Chicago viewers, the night runs on two clocks. The first calls anywhere start soon after polls begin to close — Indiana and Kentucky at 6 p.m. Eastern, then Georgia, South Carolina, Vermont and Virginia an hour later. Illinois is later in the sequence: Chicago polls stay open until 7 p.m. Central on Tuesday, and the city's and Cook County's results begin reporting after that. A race that has not been called is not a race that is lost — it is a race where the counters, by their own rule, cannot yet say the trailing candidate is out of reach.
