Decision Desk HQ

At Decision Desk HQ, we follow the data. On Election Night 2024, here’s where it led us: Our race calls, with 100% accuracy: For the third US presidential election in a row, DDHQ was the first race-call provider to project the winner: - 1:22am: DDHQ calls the presidency for Donald Trump upon calling Pennsylvania (previous call: Alaska) - 1:46am: Fox News calls the presidency for Trump upon calling Alaska (previous call: Pennsylvania) - 5:30-5:34am: everybody else (AP, ABC, CBS, CNN, NBC) upon calling Wisconsin - First organization to project the GOP House majority (thank you, Reuters, for?citing our projection?because you were waiting for your own!). - Second to Fox News in projecting the GOP Senate majority. Our Forecast Model: - Of the major forecasts (DDHQ’s, 538, Nate Silver’s, The Economist, and Split Ticket’s), DDHQ’s was the only one to correctly favor Donald Trump in their final Election Day forecast. - DDHQ correctly projected 33 of the 34 US Senate seats contested this year (we’ll get you next time, Pennsylvania!) - Our House model correctly projected 402 of 412 contested races. Our Election View System: - DDHQ developed our Election View System to help our broadcaster and streamer clients bring our results, calls and related data to life in an engaging, informative way. - NewsNation,?which?“averaged 265,000 total viewers and 68,000 demo viewers in its first year as a 24/7 news network”, was a major user of the system, along with five popular streamers: - The Daily Wire, ValueTainment, Destiny, Brian Tyler Cohen, and Breaking Points - Combined, our partners got 17 million views of their Election Night coverage featuring DDHQ’s interactive graphics - 700,000 peak concurrent viewers across the five YouTube livestreams Our Election Night web traffic: - More than 14B (that’s a “B”): requests served for our API and embedded products in 24 hours - 64: terabytes of data for the same - 350M: requests per minute at peak - 3.3M: unique visits to our website - 38M: page views (Election Night until race projection) We’re grateful to our clients and followers and as always, remain committed to independently decided results, rigorous accuracy, and transparency. https://lnkd.in/ekBQaGdY

"Decision Desk HQ had a probability meter on NewsNation’s screen that pointed to a Trump victory as early as 7 p.m. Eastern. Using DDHQ’s data, NewsNation was the first to call a battleground state, giving North Carolina to Trump at around 9:30 p.m. Eastern. It was also the first to call Georgia for Trump. NewsNation, which used data from Decision Desk HQ, called the race for Trump at 1:22 a.m. Eastern after giving the Republican 19 electoral votes from Pennsylvania and three from Alaska. Scripps News and Newsmax, which also used Decision Desk HQ, called the race within minutes." https://lnkd.in/e69pRh6c

"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." https://lnkd.in/euRdUb4m

Harvard Data Science Review just published our work on creating a real-time Election Night model. The model takes our fast and accurate county level election results and turns it into a live probabilistic assessment of who will win a race as new votes come in. Be sure to check out this model live in action on The Hill and NewsNation this Tuesday. https://lnkd.in/e-8DBz-q

"Rather than rely on in-house number crunchers, NewsNation will turn over its race calls to Decision Desk HQ, a start-up that provides election results. The company?called the 2020 election?for President Biden a day before the major networks." “What you have to do,” Mr. Stirewalt said, “is be honest with your audience about what’s going on.” https://lnkd.in/eWjXCbcZ

By day, Luke Hughes (SFS’27) is an intern with the Office of the Sergeant at Arms of the U.S. House of Representatives. By night, he's reporting election results while working part-time with Decision Desk HQ. “On Capitol Hill, I get an adrenaline rush. I am a huge congressional nerd. I’ve memorized every member of Congress, their names, faces, states, districts. Every single time I see the Capitol, it never gets old.” https://bit.ly/4dCh1tw

Congrats to us at Decision Desk HQ for scoring such a powerhouse slate of advisors in Molly Levinson Katie Harbath and Jon Cohen. Excited to work with them as we navigate 2024!