On Saturday, November 7th, most of the major news outlets claimed that Joe Biden was the president-elect of the United States. No matter how they felt about the result, most people were confused on one topic, why were they calling Biden the president-elect when all of the votes had not yet been counted?
To understand this question, one must first understand the Associated Press. The Associated Press is a newspaper that has been calling elections based on calculations since 1848. The AP (Associated Press) sends over 4,000 employees to election centers to count raw vote totals which they send to the AP decision desk.
At the AP decision desk, AP race callers are in charge of using the data they receive from the election centers across the nation. Through a data-driven process, they “call” the election. and AP race callers are people who are familiar with the states that they are calling. In fact, they start months before the election by studying election rules, requirements, and tracking changes and updates of each state’s election laws. They are trained intensively and most hold PhDs in political science. The AP race callers work closely with analytics who look over the votes county by county, how many votes are left, and how votes were cast (in person, absentee, or mail-in).
Still, though, how do these race callers call the race? The race callers call the race when it is clear that, no matter how many more votes are counted, the leader of the race will win. Simply put in words on the AP’s page, the race callers call the race when “the trailing candidates [can’t] catch the leader”. However, the race callers won’t call the race if the two top candidates have a margin less than 0.5 percentage points from each other, won’t call a U.S. House race if the margin is less than 1,000 votes, and won’t call a race for state legislature if the margin is less than 2 percent or 100 votes.
News outlets, like NBC, the New York Times, the Washington Post, CNN and the Wall Street Journal interpret AP’s race calls in their own ways. Some news outlets wait longer until they know that the AP race calls would be accurate while others call the races earlier then the AP calls the race. A small amount of news outlets use their own data to call races.
Race calling isn’t new, but the importance of its accuracy is becoming increasingly important due to other new networks having strong biases to one party over another, while AP still stands as a reliable unbiased news source, thus giving AP a bigger audience of people who want accurate, unbiased, race calls.
This was written by Gabriella Gallardo
Photo credits to Element5 Digital on Unsplash