Decision Desk HQ, the 4-year-old election data firm that has beat out it’s predecessors in calling election results for a majority of the 2020 race, has awarded Pennsylvania to Joe Biden, giving Biden 273 electoral college votes and calling him the 46th President of the United States.
Everyone 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.
Decision 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.
According to a story on FastCompany.com, the decision was made after the latest batch of ballots to come out of Philadelphia, where Trump held a slim lead until early Friday morning. Scott Tranter, who leads the call team at DDHQ, was the one who made the decision.
“We knew that as long as Biden came out ahead on that Philly drop that that was enough and Biden was not going to relinquish his lead,” Tranter says. “He’s going to increase his lead throughout the day, based on the trending and the modeling we have.”
DDHQ uses a proprietary system of analysis that they say allows them to make calls faster and more accurately. They were one of the firms who didn’t call Arizona as early as other competing agencies like Associated Press and major news networks, but essentially called the presidential race on Twitter at about 8:00 AM this morning:
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.
