With just two weeks until the 2026 midterm elections, anticipation and anxiety will only accelerate as social media is rife with the latest polls, early vote data and plenty of rumor.
When it comes to election night itself, though, there will be some uniformity in the results being reported and the way the numbers of are being interpreted.
That’s due in part because 2026 will mark the first cycle in a decade that all of the major networks will rely on Associated Press vote-count data in their election coverage.
News outlets will still make their own race calls, including the AP, but the reliance on the data is notable given the importance placed on the media’s role in declaring a winner. The AP deploys around 5,000 vote count “reporting units” at local precincts and county offices to report vote totals.
The networks also are on the same page when it comes to exit polls. The AP, along with ABC News, CBS News, NBC News, CNN, Fox News and MS NOW, also are on board with The Voter Poll, a broad state-by-state survey of verified voters that is designed to capture those who vote by mail and in person. Launched in 2025, the survey conducted by SSRS is the successor to the Edison/National Election Pool exit poll and AP VoteCast/Fox News Voter Analysis.
That unity is especially important in an age of misinformation, or when shifting results on election night and the days afterward trigger claims of election fraud. That was the situation in 2020, when Donald Trump forged ahead in declaring himself the winner and, in the months to follow, made unfounded claims of election rigging. Fox News and the AP were the first to call Arizona for Joe Biden, in the first significant sign that Trump would lose the race.
David Scott, vice president of AP elections, cautions that the survey won’t be the only thing that the news service will rely on to make projections of winners. “You are looking at so much information to do that,” he said.
“We will use The Voter Poll as part of our work on the decision desk, but ultimately the thing that drives race calls more than anything else is our assessment of vote count,” he said.
Deadline spoke with Scott about what to expect on election night, the importance of calling a winner and what he’s looking for when it comes to discerning the sentiment of the electorate.
DEADLINE: This is going to be the first cycle in a while where where all the networks and everyone is aligned with with the Associated Press in terms of the vote count on election night. How did everyone get back together?
DAVID SCOTT: We put a lot of effort at AP into something that we call the elections ecosystem, and we really feel that it’s a great value to our customers, but also to democracy. On election night, Americans can have one set of numbers that they can count on and rely on. If they’re looking at their television, if they’re looking online, if they’re looking on their phones, that there’s one vote count that is you know reflecting factor choices that ultimately they are making about who they want to lead the country. We put a lot of effort into that. Certainly, we’re not the only operation that is doing a vote count, but when you look across election night, all the major technical technology companies, the U.S. broadcast networks, big international broadcasters, the leading digital players in news in the United States. They’re all relying on the work that we do to work with election officials across the country and get their vote counts at the local level, and do the math, do the verification, and do the work to standardize that data and make it available in real time.
DEADLINE: So there’s also The Voter Poll. How will that work on election night?
SCOTT: We are part of a group of news organizations, different than the vote count, that have come together to do The Voter Poll. That includes NBC News, CBS News, CNN, ABC News, Fox News, and MS NOW, along with AP. And we combine our resources to do a comprehensive survey of the electorate, and it’s based on the methodology that the U.S. broadcast networks were using with an exit poll, interviewing voters as they leave their polling place. The methodology that we and Fox News used for many years that we called the VoteCast, which was a survey more designed for people who were voting ahead of Election Day, and trying to interview voters up to a week ahead of time, sort of at the moment that they chose to cast their ballot. So we’re really excited to bring those two methodologies together and work with the people who did the exit poll, formerly Edison Research, purchased by a company called SSRS, that’s executing the survey for us.
One of the things that we really like about this is one set of data. We’re all looking at the same numbers. We’re all able to work together to think about what’s the right question to ask. The poll is essentially a conversation with America. The resource combination allows us to do this in all 50 states. That’s something we did with VoteCast, but… we’ll be able to have survey data about what Americans are thinking as they cast their ballots in every state where there’s a statewide election — not just battlegrounds, not just important states in terms of you know where a Senate contest or a governor’s contest might be tightly contested. We really think that every state is important. Every voter’s voice matters.
DEADLINE: In in terms of the questions asked in the survey, is there anything unique [that will be asked] this cycle?
SCOTT: When I’m sitting in the newsroom on election night, the question that I’m most interested in is one of the most basic ones, which is, “What were the top issues that motivated you as you decided to cast your ballot?” We learn things. Throughout the course of the campaign, candidates are making assumptions. The advocates who are interested in the outcome of elections are pushing their issue as the most important, and that’s the thing that the candidates should be focused on. But when we get down to it, really what moves the needle in the voting booth, or when you’re sitting down at your kitchen table filling out your mail ballot, that’s what I want to know. What actually was the thing that drove things.
Now I’ve got this sort of sort of hokum that I always tell people when they ask me who’s going to win the election, and I always say, “Well, tell me what the price of gas is two Tuesdays before the election, and that’s the number-one predictor.” I’m kind of interested to find out this year if our survey shows that’s the case. The price of gas and energy prices and cost of living — everyone is assuming that’s the issue that’s going to drive this election. But when we get the survey data back, we’ll actually find out if that’s the case, and was that the thing that moved the needle this year, or was it something else?
DEADLINE: When on Election Day will some of this voter some of this Voter Poll information be available?
SCOTT: It is 5 p.m. [ET] when you are going to start seeing that data. And then, as polls close in all the states where there’s statewide elections where we have the data, we’ll be able to add details about how voters were thinking about the candidates specifically. So it’s sort of two releases of data: one that’s more broad at 5 p.m., and then once polls close in a state, things that are specific to the candidates in that state, and then the national survey, sort of our overall look at the country, will be available at 8 p.m. [ET].
DEADLINE: We had the situation after 2016 where Fox News and AP got out of the National Election Pool [and other networks were sticking with it]. What was discovered in that period of what is more effective in terms of reaching voters?
SCOTT: I think the thing that we learned from the period, in which the NEP was doing the traditional exit poll and AP and Fox were doing VoteCast, is that we’re better off together, and we’re better off with a methodology in our survey that truly, truly reaches voters in all the ways that they cast the ballot. So we need to interview people as they are exiting polling places, because tens of millions of Americans cast their ballot in person on Election Day. But we also need the methodology that we pioneered with VoteCast to reach people who are voting in advance and won’t be available at a polling place to be interviewed on Election Day. What we found was that our methodology was great. We loved VoteCast. We thought it was really a powerful storytelling tool. The NEP obviously has a long history and a proud tradition with exit polling, and I am glad that we found our way back together.
DEADLINE: As I as I understand it, you start the evening with looking at the The Voter Poll data, but as the evening goes on, you were relying more and more on the vote count.
SCOTT: 100%. The number-one thing we are looking at when determining whether to declare a winner is what the voters have done and what is in the vote count. What’s come in? What’s left? What are the results by type of ballots cast? Was it mail ballots and in-person ballots, Election Day ballots? But we’re all trying to answer the same question, which is can the trailing candidates catch up? And and once we’ve reached a conclusion based on all of the evidence that we have available, which begins and really ends with the vote count, and the state of the vote count, and what Americans have done and how they’ve cast their ballots, only when we’re certain that the trailing candidates can’t catch the leader, that’s when we can make a race call.
DEADLINE: Do you feel just in making those race calls, especially the AP race call, it’s taken on increasing importance? You’re not the official results. Those are election boards and election officials.
SCOTT: I think what’s important is that Americans, and the world really, can understand as soon as possible, but based on rock-solid, high-quality journalism, what’s happened in their democracy. The Constitution in this country sets out how we should conduct elections, and it basically delegates it to the states. But it doesn’t provide any detailed instructions on how we get to the end of the vote count and say, “All right, this is the person who’s won.” And that’s a really important story. That’s the news, and so since 1848, that’s what we’ve been doing at AP. And accuracy matters. I get asked a lot, “How do you balance accuracy versus speed?” And my answer is always, it’s not a balance. Accuracy is 100, and speed is zero. But we try to go as swiftly as possible to make sure that Americans get that answer to the question of who they pick to lead, but do so in a way that you know is focused 100% on making sure our vote count is right and our race calls are correct.
DEADLINE: Something that we’ve seen emerge in recent cycles are prediction markets. I was wondering what what impact do you think that has as you look at election-night results?
SCOTT: On election night, we have some customers who are prediction markets. They are interested in our count data, and so I’m going to be focused on making sure they’re taken care of and they’re getting what they need from AP. Our decision team has not incorporated prediction markets or the data that comes from prediction markets into our process of declaring winners. We are focused on the vote count. We’re focused on… primary source data on what’s happening in the election.