DecisionDeskHQ streams live on Twitch! Check out their videos, sign up to chat, and join their community. Decision Desk HQ projected at 11:13 p.m. On Tuesday that Sen. Kelly Loeffler, who was appointed to fill a vacancy in late 2019, lost to the Democrat Raphael Warnock. —Decision Desk HQ.
© Provided by Slate Jill and Joe Biden at a drive-in election night event in Wilmington, Delaware. Win McNamee/Getty ImagesEveryone thinks Joe Biden is going to win Pennsylvania, which means everyone thinks Joe Biden is going to be the next president of the United States. But as of 8:50 a.m. Eastern on Friday, Nov. 6, none of the major decision desks had stepped out on a limb and called the race. Enter Decision Desk HQ.
Decision Desk HQ projects that @JoeBiden has won Pennsylvania and its 20 electoral college votes for a total of 273.
Joe Biden has been elected the 46th President of the United States of America.
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Race called at 11-06 08:50 AM EST
All Results: https://t.co/BgcQsEyt3j
— Decision Desk HQ (@DecisionDeskHQ) November 6, 2020Decision Desk HQ made the call on Twitter after a batch of ballots came in from Philadelphia that put Biden in the lead by 5,587 votes in Pennsylvania. With more than 100,000 ballots still left to be counted in the state, and with those ballots tilting very heavily toward Biden, there is no realistic path for Donald Trump to win Pennsylvania. And yet, all the networks have hesitated to say unequivocally that Joe Biden will be the next president. Decision Desk HQ did not equivocate. Nate Silver, among others, thought that it was right to make the call when it did.
Good for them. The outcome has been apparent for a while. No reason other sources shouldn't follow. There's some doubt about the outcome of Georgia and Arizona, still, but Biden doesn't need those states to be elected. https://t.co/aL9359i9V8
— Nate Silver (@NateSilver538) November 6, 2020Decision Desk HQ was launched by Brandon Finnigan, whom Ben Smith described as “a right-wing truck dispatcher” in a 2014 BuzzFeed profile. At that point, according to Smith, Finnigan was working as an election tracker for the conservative blog Ace of Spades HQ “along with his dozens of volunteer Google spreadsheet jockeys.” Here’s how Finnigan described his mission:
“I want to fundamentally change how results are reported,” Finnigan told BuzzFeed News. His goal is both to modernize the local election boards and to deflate what he sees as false drama imposed by slow Associated Press calls and desperate television commentators. “I understand you need an element of suspense and you need something to jibber-jabber about on election night. But you got to jibber-jabber all year. I just want the results.”
Finnigan told Smith that he first got interested in election forecasting because he was frustrated by the networks’ slowness to call the presidential race for George W. Bush in 2004. (In the networks’ defense, they were obviously going to be skittish after wrongly calling Florida for Al Gore in 2000.) Per BuzzFeed, Finnigan “started the informal ‘Ace of Spades Headquarters Decision Desk’ in 2012,” but it wasn’t until 2014 that “his team began to really take on the AP at its own game: not just projecting elections based on public results, but also calling county offices directly to feed the tallies into a spreadsheet.”
In 2017, Decision Desk HQ partnered with BuzzFeed “to provide live coverage of elections across America” in what was described as a six-figure deal. It began working with Vox that same year; Vox said in a piece this March that Decision Desk HQ “uses gold-standard methods to call elections.” After Decision Desk made its call this morning, Vox affirmed it from its own Twitter account.
Joe Biden is projected to win the #2020Election, per Decision Desk.
The state of Pennsylvania, which Hillary Clinton lost in 2016, has been called for Joe Biden clinching the electoral win in a tightly contested vote that drew historic turnout. https://t.co/t3Aea1DevFpic.twitter.com/lJ7t5UoE9v
— Vox (@voxdotcom) November 6, 2020Here’s how Decision Desk HQ works circa 2020, according to Vox:
Media outlets pay them to do the extra work necessary to pull results together. Decision Desk uses an API, or application programming interface, that essentially allows the firm to get the information at the same time as it’s published on the website, provided by election officials. It also scrapes information directly from other public sites. And it uses old-fashioned methods, like phone calls and faxes—though to a far lesser extent than the AP does.
Those new-school and old-fashioned methods culminated in a call that, as of 9:56 a.m. Eastern, has been retweeted more than 55,000 times and quote-tweeted almost 30,000 more.
We did it! We repudiated this cruel and monstrous ideology. It’s a full Rout! Be proud and strong and let’s win the Senate. @ReverendWarnock@ossoff and listen to the Black women and BIPOC who got us here. Lean into our movement. Not run away. https://t.co/V4uLyc0cxn
— Mark Ruffalo (@MarkRuffalo) November 6, 2020On Friday morning, Vox’s election-calling partner, Decision Desk, called that Joe Biden has won the state of Pennsylvania — and that he therefore has won enough electoral votes to win the presidency.
Other election-calling operations, such as the Associated Press and those at the major television networks, have not yet done the same.
“The race is over, as far as our call is concerned, because of the vote totals coming out of Philadelphia this morning,” Drew McCoy, the president of Decision Desk, tells me in an interview. “It became pretty obvious that as the remaining votes across the state and in Philadelphia are counted, Biden’s lead will continue to grow.”
That’s for a few reasons. First, according to the state, there are at least 30,000 mail ballots in Philadelphia remaining to be counted (and potentially more in-person Election Day votes there as well). “Biden’s consistently winning Philly’s vote with 80-plus percent, sometimes as much as 87 percent in some drops,” McCoy says. On top of that, there are another 30,000 mail ballots in Allegheny County that remain to be counted, and mail ballots there have also gone heavily to Biden so far.
Decision Desk HQ projects that @JoeBiden has won Pennsylvania and its 20 electoral college votes for a total of 273.
Joe Biden has been elected the 46th President of the United States of America.
Race called at 11-06 08:50 AM EST
All Results: https://t.co/BgcQsEyt3j
“But it’s not simply just the locations or the numbers, it’s the types” of votes remaining to be counted, McCoy continues. That is: much of what’s left to count are mail ballots. And so far, mail ballots in Pennsylvania have favored Biden — even in pro-Trump areas.
Considering all that, McCoy says, he is “confident” that when all is said and done, Biden’s lead in Pennsylvania will be above the 0.5 percent margin that would trigger an automatic recount. He estimates Biden will end up winning the state by “probably in the 1 to 2 percent range,” but adds “there’s some margin of error in that.”
Why Pennsylvania isn’t like Georgia (or Arizona)
The call of Pennsylvania for Biden is notable because Decision Desk has not called either Georgia or Arizona — two other states where Biden leads.
“Georgia flipped overnight, but it’s not simply a case of a trailing candidate suddenly leads and we can make a call,” McCoy says. “It’s a very different situation in Georgia.”
The reason: Pennsylvania has tens of thousands more ballots to be counted that we have every reason to expect will only expand Biden’s currently small lead. But in Georgia, the count is nearly — but not quite — done, and Biden’s lead is even smaller (a little over 1,000 votes).
PA Presidential Election Results - Called for Biden (D)
Biden (D): 49.48% (3,297,553 votes)
Trump (R): 49.29% (3,290,989 votes)
Biden Margin: 6,564
Estimated: > 95% votes in
More results here: https://t.co/BgcQsEyt3j
McCoy points out that thousands of overseas and military ballots in Georgia could still remain, as well as provisional ballots. (These are ballots for which there’s some sort of problem with the voter’s information: “Sometimes they’re counted, sometimes they’re not; they’re going to have to be adjudicated,” McCoy says.)
“There’s a real possibility the state could swing back to Donald Trump,” McCoy says. “So that’s not a state we’re going to call. It’s a question about what’s out there.”
Then there’s Arizona, where Biden currently leads by about 1.5 percentage points, and which Fox News and the Associated Press called for Biden days ago. Decision Desk has not yet done the same.
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Vox live results: Joe Biden wins the presidency
“Arizona is a really interesting case,” says McCoy. “What we have counted obviously benefits Biden, but as we’ve seen over the course of two days, the margin has shrunk somewhat. It’s simply a question of wanting to see more. We know that there are substantial ballots out, but they’re different. Maricopa County is not the same as some of the other counties in the state.” (I spoke to McCoy at 10 am Eastern, before Maricopa County released updated vote totals Friday morning.)
An issue here is that unlike in states that dramatically expanded mail voting this year (where Republicans were more reluctant to vote that way), Arizona Republicans had a history of voting by mail and many did choose to do so — but many also seem to have returned their ballots late, and those are being counted now. This is simply not a dynamic evident in Pennsylvania.
McCoy says the numbers in Arizona “are right on the edge, and we think it will be a close race, so given that, we are not in a rush to call it.” He adds that the calls for Arizona from Fox and the AP are “certainly defensible” and that “these folks are professionals,” but that “applying our benchmarks, our tools, we’re saying we need to see more.”
Why recounts are very unlikely to swing the election to Trump
With Georgia and Arizona still uncalled, Biden needs to hold on to both Pennsylvania and Wisconsin to be sure of topping the 270 electoral votes he needs for victory. (Michigan looked close on election night, but the outcome is no longer in question, Biden leads by 2.5 percentage points — nearly 150,000 votes.)
GA Presidential Election Results
Biden (D): 49.39.% ( 2,450,117 votes)
Trump (R): 49.37% ( 2,448,538 votes)
Biden Margin: 1,579 (+483)
Estimated: > 99% votes in
More results here: https://t.co/xlHf7GZUxJ
As mentioned, McCoy and Decision Desk feel “confident” that Biden’s final margin of victory in Pennsylvania will be above the 0.5 percent that would trigger a recount. But what about Wisconsin, where Biden currently leads by 0.63 percent of the vote, and where the Trump campaign has said it intends to ask for a recount? (The campaign has the legal right to request this, though state law says the campaign must pay for it if the final margin is outside 0.25 percent.)
The problem for Trump, McCoy says, is that Biden’s lead in Wisconsin is about 20,000 votes. “That would be an astronomically large number to overturn in a recount.” Asked whether such a thing has ever happened, McCoy responded, “Not that we could find.”
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Generally, according to McCoy, if a race is decided by 1,000 votes or fewer, that’s about the “outer reach” of the sort of shift we might expect during a recount. In Wisconsin specifically, the presidential race was recounted in 2016 and the outcome only shifted by 131 votes. (Notably, even Republican former Gov. Scott Walker tweeted that “20,000 is a high hurdle” to overcome in a recount.)
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Again, Georgia is a different story — Biden’s lead there is just over 1,000 votes, too close to be totally comfortable. But Biden’s lead in Wisconsin appears large enough to withstand a recount, and his lead in Pennsylvania is highly likely to end up there too.
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