Fox News was right to call Arizona for Joe Biden on election night in the most important sense: It said he would win, and he ultimately did. But a race call is not an ordinary prediction. Here's what you need to know.
If you’re a subscriber to this newsletter, I’d guess you’d be interested in my colleague Peter Baker’s article about the drama at Fox News in the aftermath of its decision to call Arizona for Joe Biden on election night.
Of course, everyone knows heads or tails is a 50-50 proposition. It’s much harder to know whether Biden had a 50.1% or 99.9% chance of winning Arizona based on the data available at 11:20 p.m. Eastern on election night, when Fox called the state for Biden. Most other news organizations didn’t think so; only The Associated Press, a few hours later, joined Fox in making the call so quickly. And in the end, Biden won Arizona by just three-tenths of a percentage point — a margin evoking a coin flip.
A Fox spokesperson on Sunday said that “Fox News continues to stand by its decision desk’s accurate call of Arizona.” When asked on election night on Fox to explain the Arizona call, Mishkin rejected the notion that Trump would do well in the outstanding ballots. Instead, he said he expected Biden to win the remaining vote:of the expected vote and they’ll be getting that.” He added: “But the reality is that’s just not true. They’re likely to only get 44These figures were repeated by Daron Shaw, a Republican pollster on the Fox decision desk, and Mishkin in subsequent appearances.
On their face, these arguments weren’t outlandish. Biden won Maricopa County, which is the home of Phoenix and a majority of Arizona voters. He won the mail vote in Arizona as well.How could a group of mostly mail-in and mostly Maricopa ballots break for Trump by such a wide margin?While “mail” votes sound monolithic, there can be important differences between mail ballots counted before and after the election.
But in 2020, whether the late ballots would be overwhelmingly Republican was nonetheless “the big question,” as I wrote before the election. As a result, we never contemplated the possibility of a call in Arizona on election night; it was an easy decision for us to reject the AP call without knowing exactly how the “late” mail ballots would break.
In fairness to Fox News and the AP, it was hard to anticipate the difference between early and late mail ballots ahead of the election. It required marrying a detailed understanding of absentee ballot returns with an equally deep understanding of the mechanics of how Arizona counts mail ballots. It’s hard to evaluate why the model was so confident. What’s clear is that it provided a basis for Fox to call the race, even as there were mounting nonstatistical reasons to begin to doubt the estimates.
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