CLEVELAND — In the 2016 and 2020 races for president Decision Desk HQ was the first to call the wins for Donald Trump and Joe Biden and the control of Congress in 2022.
"We're one of the three organizations that on election night go around and collect all of the vote, we aggregate it up and then we pipe it in to news organizations and newsrooms like yours and then we look at that data and then we make race projections on who is going to win," said DDHQ's Director of Data Science Scott Tranter.
Founded in 2012, DDHQ has changed the way election night results are handled using ever-evolving new technologies that focus on accuracy and transparency.
"We don't look at polls, we don't look at models on election night, we look at the actual vote count as reported by counties and states," he said. "So that there is no room for error and we're looking at first-party data, we're looking at your vote."
Ahead of Tuesday, they're studying the individual races, fundraising and early voting patterns. They rank the battle for U.S. Senate here as the nation's only true toss-up.
"This is one of the closest senate races in the country. It could be the one that decides the Senate if Montana doesn't go the Republicans' way or it could be the one that pads the Republicans path to control the Senate," said Tranter.
After winning the Republican Primary in March, they put Bernie Moreno's chances of defeating Sherrod Brown at 35%.
"He has inched up. Right now he is sitting at 53% chance which is essentially a coin flip," he said. "I think from a trending standpoint his race has the highest variability of any senate race and even if you factor in some of these presidential battleground states I mean his chances have moved up almost 20 points over the last six months."
So they'll be watching that race closely as well as Democrat Marcy Kaptur's battle for a 22nd term in Congress. She faces a challenge from Republican State Rep. Derek Merrin.
"It's the bellwether seat I'm going to be looking at on Election night. It will tell us where Donald Trump and the Harris race is going to go and it's also a bellwether for your senate race." That's because she's a Democrat in a district Donald Trump won in 2020 by roughly 2.9%. "It's possible Donald Trump could win her district by a significant amount and where Marcy Kaptur ends up on that will tell us a lot about how much the Republican electorate has shifted."
They'll also be looking closely at the early vote, which will be the first numbers released around 8 p.m. on election night. Numbers that previously gave Democrats in Ohio strong election night leads to start. But this year there's been a greater level of participation by Republicans in early voting.
"So I think that will effect what we see when the polls close in Ohio and we start counting those votes," Tranter told News 5. "It will certainly effect the roller coaster we've seen in the past where Democrats start off strong or Republicans start off strong depending on which county and what order they report those ballots. I expect a little more even vote counting out of Ohio."
As the group that was first to call the presidential race in 2016 and '20, when does he think we might know who won Tuesday?
"My medium base case is if Donald Trump is able to flip Georgia and keep North Carolina I think the race will be decided in the upper midwest with Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin and what we saw in the primary is those states have gotten a lot better at counting their ballots, specifically Pennsylvania," he said. "So I think there is a decent chance that we will know sometime Wednesday morning if that's how the race goes. If all of these states are close and within recount range I could see it taking several days if not longer."
