In the days that followed the 2020 election, as the nation waited with bated breath and twisted stomach for the final call on who had won, the team at the election-tracking organization Decision Desk HQ barely slept. Running on adrenaline and continuous infusions of caffeine, its analysts and data scientists were glued to their monitors around the clock, watching the slow trickle of results from Pennsylvania that ultimately would decide the race.
“In those few days, I think I got four or five hours of sleep,” says Decision Desk HQ President Drew McCoy.
Finally, on early Friday morning, the numbers were conclusive: At 8:50 a.m., Decision Desk HQ became the first organization to call the 2020 presidential race for Joe Biden — a full day before major television networks followed suit.
The early call brought Decision Desk HQ into the national spotlight, a significant moment for a firm that only entered the election-calling space in 2012, joining the Associated Press and Edison Media Research in collecting and analyzing publicly available voting data for media organizations. Yet McCoy insists that being first was never the objective. In an election year marked by unprecedented challenges, from a historic pandemic to intense political polarization, the data were all that mattered.
“With that call and every call we make, it’s not about being first,” McCoy says. “It’s about looking at the data and coming to the right conclusion.”
While most modern U.S. presidential elections have been called on election night or in the early hours of the following day, the 2020 race took place under extraordinary circumstances, with the pandemic pushing a record number of voters to cast mail-in ballots. This shift had been particularly evident in the crucial battleground of Pennsylvania, where absentee ballots continued to arrive for days after election day. With President Trump’s early lead eroding, Decision Desk HQ’s team focused on key Democratic strongholds, such as Philadelphia and Allegheny County, where Biden was picking up large margins of the vote.
“We knew the margin that Trump was leading by, we knew how many ballots were left to count and we knew how they were breaking,” McCoy says. By Friday morning, as the last votes rolled in from Philadelphia, splitting roughly 80-20 in Biden’s favor, it was clear that Trump’s lead had evaporated and could not be regained. “There was nothing magical about the remaining ballots,” McCoy says, calling the calculation “a simple algebra problem.” “The Republican areas had already fully reported.”
After Decision Desk HQ and its media clients Vox and Business Insider declared that the Scranton-born Biden had won Pennsylvania and thus the White House, famed polling guru Nate Silver praised the call on Twitter, writing, “Good for them. The outcome has been apparent for a while. No reason other sources shouldn’t follow.”
Still, other media organizations, looking at the very same data, held off until Saturday morning before officially declaring Biden the winner, haunted by the memory of past missteps. The most infamous of these had occurred in 2000, when several networks prematurely called Florida for Al Gore, only to retract the call and later declare George W. Bush the winner, as the state plunged into a protracted recount. With political tensions at a peak in 2020 and misinformation spreading like wildfire, the pressure to avoid another high-profile error loomed large.
Speaking to The Times shortly after the election, as viewers remained racked with anxiety over the yet-to-be-announced result, Susan Zirinsky, then president of CBS News, explained the network was determined to avoid a rush to call the winner. “We have a motto: Slow is not a problem,” she said.
Though McCoy is hesitant to speculate on the cause for other news organizations’ hesitation, his team was uniquely positioned to pull the trigger quickly, without the corporate or political pressures that might weigh on legacy networks. “I wouldn’t want to speak for them,” he says. “I’m sure they had their reasons. They’re very experienced at doing this. … Our call team is as insulated from everything as possible. We make calls based on the data we have.”
Building on the success of their pivotal 2020 call, as Decision Desk HQ prepares for the upcoming election under an even more white-hot spotlight, McCoy emphasizes that the firm is focusing on staying up to date with changes to how voting will be conducted in key states. “For us, it’s about the rules and legislation that has been passed in the last four years,” he says, noting that several states have changed their voting processes since 2020, including Pennsylvania and Georgia.
Managing the flow of misinformation will be one of the biggest challenges facing news organizations in 2024. In an age of viral social media posts, rumors and falsehoods — whether pushed by campaigns, supporters or foreign adversaries — can easily overshadow the facts. McCoy says his team’s approach remains grounded in real-time data from election officials, insulating them from speculation and unverified reports. “We don’t care if somebody tweets out an election result or if they put a photo up — that’s not a source,” he says.
For those hoping for a call on Tuesday night, technology and improved reporting processes could help speed things up in some areas. Still, McCoy cautions that the 2024 election may again take several days to resolve, noting that in battleground states like Arizona and Georgia, razor-thin margins could slow the final call. “I think people expect this to be a close election,” he says. “In 2020, we saw exceedingly close margins of 12,000 or 16,000 votes in states like Arizona and Georgia. That’s always going to take more time than traditional margins of 2% or 3%.”
As Decision Desk HQ gears up for another high-stakes election, McCoy’s team, which will be tracking some 40,000 federal, state and local races for clients including the Hill, NewsNation and Scripps TV stations, remains guided by the same principles that brought them into the spotlight in 2020: Trust the data, ignore the noise and make the call when the math is clear.
“I always say we don’t necessarily call winners — we identify the loser,” McCoy says. “When the polls close and all the ballots are counted, the result is there. We’re just discovering it.”