How News Organizations Will Make Tuesday's Midterm Race Calls, Reuters Explains

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, Reuters reported in a Nov. 1 explainer read in full by this desk. 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 AP, a nonprofit newsroom that has counted votes in every U.S. election since 1848, said it would deploy more than 4,000 reporters at county election offices and local polling locations for the 2026 midterms, Reuters reported. The AP 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, and its final projections require unanimous team agreement and a sign-off from its head of data science, Scott Tranter, Reuters reported.

The first calls will start soon after polls begin to close, first with Indiana and Kentucky at 6 p.m. ET and then Georgia, South Carolina, Vermont and Virginia at 7 p.m., Reuters reported. Low public trust complicates the calls: 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, Reuters reported. Retractions are rare, but both providers have withdrawn calls in the past — including, earlier this year, a Decision Desk HQ call in the Democratic primary for a special election in New Jersey's 11th Congressional District, Reuters reported.