On Tuesday, after America has its say at the voting booth for the midterms, millions of viewers will tune into news networks across the country to watch the results roll in and find out which party will control Congress. From cable networks CNN, MS NOW, and Fox News to broadcast giants CBS, NBC, and ABC, nearly every major television network will be drawing from the same source of data, provided by The Associated Press, the nonprofit organization that has been tallying votes across the country since 1848.

It will mark the first time since 2016 that all the major broadcast networks and most cable news networks will rely on the AP's election data, after many turned to Edison Research in 2024. And the organization's reach extends well beyond television. Major print publications, including The New York Times, The Washington Post, and The Wall Street Journal, will also rely on AP vote counts, while partnerships with Google and OpenAI will put its results in front of an even larger swath of the American public.

It’s an impressive industry-wide consolidation around the same election data, particularly at a time when the information environment has become increasingly fractured. For the AP in particular, it comes as the organization remains engulfed in a legal battle with Donald Trump over his preferred nomenclature for the Gulf of Mexico and as he continues to sow doubt in elections that look like they won’t go well for the party he leads.

Meanwhile, misinformation spreads across social media instantaneously, public confidence in the electoral system remains strained, and the rapid growth of prediction markets has introduced yet another set of questionable numbers for Americans to peruse as they await official results. And against that backdrop, the organizations responsible for collecting and interpreting election data are confronting additional scrutiny and competition, even as the commercial value of their work expands.

Julie Pace, the AP's executive editor, told Status ahead of Tuesday's midterms that the organization views its expanding reach as an “enormous responsibility” and holds itself to the “highest standards,” with “accuracy and fact-based data being at the core of what we do.”

Pace contended that the media consolidation around the wire service serves as a safeguard. “We really want to make sure there is one vote count in the market, one common baseline that people can draw from, because I think if you have multiple sources, that can lead to some of the confusion,” she said.

But not everyone agrees. The upstart Decision Desk HQ’s director of data science, Scott Tranter, will be stationed in an election war room with over a dozen analysts on Tuesday, with their tabulations set to air on NewsNation, the lone cable news network using DDHQ for its election data. Tranter countered that concentrating election data in the hands of a single organization does a disservice to the transparency of the electoral system.

“The founding of the company was based on the premise that in democracy, everyone’s involved,” he told Status. “You have to have more than one vote count so you can have transparency.”

The competing philosophies underscore the stakes facing the organizations responsible for informing the American public of election results. With confidence in legacy media and U.S. electoral institutions at a low, the pressure to deliver accurate information quickly has only intensified. Behind that responsibility is an increasingly diversified business where news organizations, technology platforms, and financial firms all pay for access to election data.

For the AP, Election Night is a significant part of the organization’s revenue and overall business, I’m told. The organization is preparing to count and declare winners in nearly 7,000 races across the country, drawing on a massive network of journalists, data analysts, technology staff, and local reporting operations. The major undertaking is coordinated from the AP’s Washington bureau, where the election command center will operate for as long as it takes to determine the outcomes of the many closely contested races.

“It’s a huge operation,” Pace told me. “We sometimes refer to it as the single largest act of journalism, certainly at the AP, and I would argue almost anywhere.”

The process of tallying votes is painstaking. As results arrive from state and local election officials, analysts examine the outstanding ballots and whether the trailing candidate has any mathematically viable path to victory. In particularly close races, the decision can take days, with teams of journalists responsible for contacting local election officials to determine exactly how many votes remain outstanding. Of course, the networks each maintain their own decision desks, which independently analyze incoming vote totals, whether supplied by the AP or gathered through their own reporting, to make projections and call races separately.

“We really focus on what is sort of the worst-case scenario here,” Pace said, when determining whether to call a race or if a flip is still possible. “Once we’ve decided that there is no viable path, that’s when we call the race,” referring to the process as “hurry up and wait” in moments. It is a process Pace knows well from 2020, when the presidential election stretched across several days and the AP's attention increasingly narrowed to Pennsylvania, before eventually declaring Joe Biden the winner.

Of course, that decision came amid a barrage of attacks from Trump, who disputed the election results and sought to undermine confidence in the vote count. And still, six years later, the organization is once again preparing for the possibility that its calls on Tuesday could draw partisan attacks. But Pace stressed that the AP’s methodology remains unchanged, regardless of the outcome or who might challenge it.

“When it comes to the integrity of our race calls, we are the same news organization…that called two presidential elections for Donald Trump, and have called many consequential and impactful races for both Republicans and Democrats,” Pace noted. “We apply the exact same standard to every race. This is a data-driven operation. It has nothing to do with politics.”

And if the AP finds itself under fire on Tuesday, Pace is prepared to point to the organization’s long history of accurate election reporting as a defense. “So if we were to come under scrutiny, if we were to face questions from any corner, I would hope that our long track record—we’ve been doing this since 1848, so we’ve got a bit of practice at it—would speak for itself. If we get challenged, that’s where we’ll be,” she said.

That confidence also informs how the AP characterizes its election decisions, with Pace emphatic about one important distinction in the election data market. “When we call a race, we’re not making a projection.” She continued that “We always read a projection as a bit of a hedge. You give yourself the ability to walk it back. When we call a race, it’s a race call. It’s not a projection. This person is the winner.”

When I mentioned that distinction to Tranter, he bristled. “Let me be very clear, we don’t call anything,” he said. “The job to call a race is not my job. It’s not the job of the Associated Press. It’s the job of the Secretary of State or the State election official. We’re not calling races, we’re projecting them.”

Tranter acknowledged that the disagreement might seem semantic, but argued that the distinction matters when Americans are already skeptical of election systems and data. “How we talk about this, and how we portray our data, is very important,” he continued. “We are not so full of ourselves as to assume we pronounce winners. We’re just analyzing data and projecting it.”

Of course, the differences between DDHQ and the AP’s election operation extend well beyond terminology. DDHQ, a for-profit company, has built its business around speed, comprehensiveness, and transparency, Tranter said. While the data is collected and analyzed in nearly identical ways, DDHQ has different values and promises its clients comprehensive results as quickly as possible.

The Nexstar-owned NewsNation started working with the outfit in 2022, as the cable network looked for a differentiator in the data space and to ensure that its election calls were independent. “We are in a world where democracy delays, democracy denies, and being able to get through this stuff fast and accurately is important,” Tranter said.

Meanwhile, the AP has partnered with technology companies, financial institutions, and prediction markets that seek access to verified information. One such partnership is the organization’s commercial relationship with Kalshi, a particularly notable arrangement because it runs in the opposite direction of most media-prediction market deals. Some news organizations have agreed to incorporate Kalshi or Polymarket data into their coverage, but the AP is providing its own data to Kalshi, serving as a source of information for the platform rather than using its speculative forecasts.

Ahead of the midterms, prediction market companies have aggressively courted media companies, striking agreements with CNN, CBS News, CNBC, and more to bring betting odds and market forecasts into an already saturated space. The proliferation of competing forecasts has raised additional questions about whether consumers will be able to effectively distinguish between speculation, powered by financial incentives, and genuine verified results.

Pace said she doesn’t view prediction markets as competitors to the AP's election operation, as the organizations perform completely different functions in the market. “I don’t see it as a challenge because I think we do very different things,” she said. "We are not actively predicting what is going to happen. We're doing the opposite of that."

But Tranter asserted that the relationship is more symbiotic, explaining that “without our data, prediction markets are much less likely to be valuable. It’s complementary in that sense.”

He did, however, caution that prediction market data should be placed in the proper context, or else it could further confuse the public. “Just putting a betting market on screen, I don’t know if that’s helpful,” Tranter said.

“You have to put it in context, and I think that’ll be the challenge for anyone who’s got these partnerships,” he added.

[Data via Box Office Mojo]

The latest episode of Power Lines is out.

In this week’s episode: Bari Weiss spoke out about her tumultuous tenure at CBS News. We break down what she said—including a fantastical claim that CBS is more trusted today than when she took over just more than a year ago. Meanwhile, Fox News ratings are hitting lows not seen in decades. We unpack why that’s an ominous sign for Republicans ahead of the midterm elections. Also, progressive streamer Hasan Piker is suing CNN’s MAGA pundit, Scott Jennings, making good on earlier threats. We analyze what’s at stake.

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