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| Shtinamin_ said: How come the AP (and everyone else) has declared the New Hampshire primary race over (even though they only have 25% reporting)? It’s not over til it’s over. |
A few things:
A call basically starts as a projection. It's not an official result. It's basically an outlet making an educated judgment call. It's possible for a call to be wrong.
CNN called Florida for Gore in 2000:
Obviously this didn't end up being the correct call.
They make these judgment calls based off things like polling and previous election results. For example, California pretty consistently votes for Democrats at the federal level. They might expect from polling that California will vote 63% for the Democratic Nominee in 2024 and 34% for the Republican Nominee for President, and it helps that is what the last election looked like there. An outlet might call the election extremely early in California, because they might be seeing the early vote go the way they expected, or maybe even more slanted towards Democratic than they expected. Some of those states, I think even frequently get called when there are still 0 votes, just because it would require an unprecedented Christmas miracle for things to go the other way.
In this case, they might have had something like "in these counties we expect Haley to win by 2%, and in these counties we expect Trump to win by 4%." And these will have a margin of error of about 3%. If we start the real count on those Haley counties, and Trump is actually winning by 1% (that is within the margin of error to still be accurate polling); then it's pretty safe to conclude that Trump will win the whole state. If he didn't, that would require the Trump counties to actually go to Haley, and that would require the +4% Trump to be a very large unexpected error.
Every vote will be counted to be sure, and as I said the call isn't an official result.
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