When Will Election Results Be Announced? How the AP and the Decision Desks Will Call Tuesday's Races
The first calls could come minutes after the first polls close at 6 p.m. Eastern — but a call is a statistical judgment, not a count. Here is who makes them, what they are looking at, and why New Jersey's numbers will come from the counties, not the state.
It is the question voters start typing before a single poll closes: when will we know? The honest answer, laid out in Reuters' Nov. 1 explainer on how news organizations will make their midterm race calls — read in full by this desk — is that Tuesday night's answers come in two kinds: vote counts, gathered slowly from officials, and race calls, which are judgments made on top of those counts long before the counting is done.
Most American newsrooms build those calls on two providers. The Associated Press has counted votes in every U.S. election since 1848 and says it will deploy more than 4,000 reporters at county election offices and polling places for the 2026 midterms, feeding the decision desks at ABC, CBS, Fox, CNN and NBC. The AP calls a race only when its analysts conclude the trailing candidate cannot catch up. Its rival, Decision Desk HQ, pulls vote totals directly from official state election sources, refines a turnout estimate through the night, and — per its head of data science Scott Tranter, quoted by Reuters — requires unanimous team agreement and his sign-off before projecting a winner.
The clock starts early: the first polls close in Indiana and Kentucky at 6 p.m. Eastern, and some races can be called almost instantly where most voting already happened early. New Jersey's polls close at 8 p.m. — and Garden State voters should know what this station reported in its counting explainer: the state Division of Elections posts no running totals on election night at all, so the numbers that matter here come from the 21 county websites, while national outlets layer their calls over the AP's count. A call in a New Jersey race will still only arrive when the outstanding vote can no longer change the answer.
Two cautions belong in every viewer's head on Tuesday. Trust is thin: a recent Medill poll found more than 60 percent of Americans have some confidence in accurate election reporting, but only 32 percent have high confidence. And calls can be wrong — retractions are rare, Reuters notes, but Decision Desk HQ withdrew a projection earlier this year in the Democratic primary for the special election in New Jersey's own 11th Congressional District, after the Election Day count shifted the race. The calls will come fast on Tuesday. The count, as always, will take as long as it takes.
