How the Race Calls Texas Will Watch on Tuesday Night Actually Get Made: 4,000 AP Reporters, Two Vote Counts, and One Rule — the Trailing Candidate Cannot Catch Up
Reuters explains the machinery behind Election Night: the AP has counted votes since 1848, Decision Desk HQ checks official state sites, and no call comes until the math says the race is over.
On Tuesday night, newsrooms across the country will call winners in one of the most closely contested midterm cycles in recent years long before all the votes are counted, and Reuters' explainer lays out the machinery Texas viewers will be watching. 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 for race calls, Reuters reported, while 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 AP's operation is the older of the two by more than a century and a half. A nonprofit newsroom supported by member newspapers, it has counted votes in every United States election since 1848, working with a national network of reporters and election officials to verify results. For the 2026 midterms, the AP said it would 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 — networks that also rely on research firm SSRS, which acquired exit-polling company Edison Research in 2025, for exit polls. The AP's rule is the one that governs the night: it 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.
Decision Desk HQ works the other side of the same problem, collecting vote counts from official state sources — usually secretaries of state or state election departments — with software that repeatedly checks official election websites for newly posted totals, alongside reporters on the ground. Its clients include NewsNation, the Hill and Newsmax, and it recently signed up X, the social network. Its final projections require unanimous team agreement and a sign-off from its head of data science, Scott Tranter. The first calls will start soon after polls begin to close — Indiana and Kentucky first at 6 p.m. Eastern, then Georgia, South Carolina, Vermont and Virginia at 7 p.m. Eastern — hours before Texas polls close at 7 p.m. Central. For Dallas–Fort Worth viewers, that sequence is the night's rhythm: the national picture will be forming on other states' counts while Texas's own record-turnout early vote is still being added to Tuesday's ballots, and every call they see will carry one of those two operations' judgment behind it.
