How Tuesday Night's Winners Get Called: the AP's 4,000 Reporters, Two Vote Counters, and a Rule That the Trailer Cannot Catch Up
When Texas races are called on Tuesday night, the call will almost certainly trace to one of two counters — the Associated Press, counting votes as it has since 1848, or Decision Desk HQ — and to a simple test: can the trailing candidate still catch up?
Every screen in Dallas–Fort Worth will show a winner sometime on Tuesday night, and almost every one of those calls will rest on the same machinery, Reuters explained in a November 1 guide to how U.S. news organizations will make their midterm race calls. 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; Fox News and CBS News will make their own projections from the AP vote count, exit polls, early-vote totals and their own statistical modeling.
The AP's operation is the older one by more than a century: it has counted votes in every U.S. election since 1848, and for the 2026 midterms it will deploy more than 4,000 reporters at county election offices and polling locations, feeding the decision desks at ABC News, CBS News, Fox, CNN and NBC News. Its rule is deliberately plain — a race is called only when the trailing candidate cannot catch up. To judge that, the AP divides the votes reported by election officials by its estimate of total turnout, and estimates how many votes remain uncounted from past voting patterns and early-vote totals.
The evening will not wait for Texas. The first calls start soon after polls begin to close in the east — Indiana and Kentucky at 6 p.m. ET, then Georgia, South Carolina, Vermont and Virginia at 7 p.m. ET — hours before Texas polls close at 7 p.m. CT. Decision Desk HQ, for its part, requires unanimous agreement on its team and a sign-off from its head of data science, Scott Tranter, before a final projection. For Dallas and Tarrant voters watching the Senate and governor's races, the takeaway is the one both counters share: a call is a mathematical judgment about the votes that remain, not a count of every ballot — and in a close Texas race, that judgment may honestly take a while.
