the funny part is I’m a US citizen and this still looks whack to me, I think it has since been updated tho and they called it based on estimated ballots or something which still seems weird but oh well
A: AP race callers have a wide range of tools at their disposal to analyze the state of a race. They include AP’s vote count, which it has conducted in every U.S. presidential election since 1848. The Decision Desk also has access to data from AP VoteCast, our wide-ranging survey of the American electorate.
Race callers collaborate with analysts who focus on statewide races, such as those for U.S. Senate and governor, and elections for the U.S. House of Representatives. The editors at AP’s Decision Desk sign off on every race call for president, U.S. Senate and governor.
Together, they are looking at far more than just the overall vote totals. They study the incoming vote county by county. In states where the information is available, they look at the vote by type of ballot: cast in person on Election Day, or in advance by mail or in person. They are also in constant contact with AP’s vote count team, in search of the latest information about what’s been counted so far and how many ballots may still be left to count.
Much attention this year has focused on when ballots will be counted by election officials – before Election Day, on Election Day or on the days after. This is something AP’s Decision Desk has long factored into making a race call. In 2018, for example, Republican Martha McSally led in the race for U.S. Senate in Arizona on election night. AP waited to declare a winner because we expected Democrat Kyrsten Sinema would fare much better than McSally in late-arriving mail ballots that would be counted after Election Day. She did, and AP called Sinema the winner the following Monday.
All of this reporting and analysis is aimed at determining the answer to a single question: Can the trailing candidates catch the leader? Only when the answer is an unquestionable “no” is the race is ready to be called
my2cents 