How Tuesday Night's Race Calls Will Actually Work: 4,000 AP Reporters, Two Data Desks, and No Call Until a Candidate Cannot Catch Up
Before the first winner is projected on Tuesday, it helps to know who is counting — and what a call really means.
When the first winners flash across screens on Tuesday night, the numbers behind them will mostly come from two operations. A Reuters explainer read this cycle reported that most television networks and digital outlets rely on the Associated Press or the election-data firm Decision Desk HQ for their vote counts, with some outlets making their own projections from the AP count, exit polls and early-vote totals.
The AP's operation is the older and larger of the two. The nonprofit news cooperative has counted votes in every American election since 1848, and for the 2026 midterms it said it would deploy more than 4,000 reporters at county election offices and polling locations. A call, in the AP's method, is not a guess at momentum: it weighs reported vote totals against an estimate of how many votes remain uncounted, refined through the night, and it is made only when the trailing candidate cannot catch up.
The 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. Florida's polls close at 7 p.m. local time, which means 8 p.m. Eastern for the Central-time Panhandle counties west of Tallahassee. In a cycle this close, the explainer's caution is the one to keep: some races may be called the instant polls close because so much voting happened early, and others will wait until the remaining-vote math is certain.
