Fox News decision desk chief Arnon Mishkin has said that the “over/under” for when the election is likely to be called is the Saturday after the election - four days after Americans go to the polls.
The 69-year-old noted when speaking to Politico that the Saturday after the election was when the last call was made when Biden won the 2020 election.
Mishkin, a consultant not officially employed by Fox, told Politico that he plans on making the call on who has won the election as soon as possible but that the vote counting may take a few days to finalize the results. He has led the network’s decision desk since 2008 and has a team of nine analysts.
He garnered attention in 2012 when he rejected George W Bush advisor Karl Rove’s questioning of Fox’s call that Obama had won Ohio. More recently, in 2020, he defended the network’s call that President Joe Biden had won a tight race in Arizona. Some said the call was made too early, but Biden eventually won the state by just over 10,000 votes.
The projection and then-President Trump’s attempt to overturn the results in the state created chaos at Fox and prompted some employees to leave the network.
But Mishkin told Politico that he had no plans to leave the helm of the decision desk chief this time around.
Noting that the race “seems very, very close,” Mishkin said that when he’ll call the election depends on several states, such as Pennsylvania, “that we believe are going to be reporting in a pattern similar to the way they have reported in the past.”
“So I’d say, the over/under is Saturday. Which was when the call was made last time. Which is when Pennsylvania is likely to come in,” he added. “I think we have to accept the reality that we don’t really know how close this election is going to be. I’m pretty sure it’s going to be close.”
Mishkin said he believes “the real issue is what happens to Trump. I’ve always thought this about this election – It’s less about who’s running against him than it’s about Trump.”
Speaking about 2020, Mishkin told Politico, “It was clear that we had evidence that our poll was accurate in Arizona — maybe not in other states, but in Arizona we had evidence of that.”
“And based on that, we estimated that Candidate X — in this case, Biden — had a lead that was four standard deviations from being able to be taken over,” he added. “We had another model as well, the [outstanding vote needed] model, which said it was not going to be possible for Candidate B, who was in this case Donald Trump, to take over.”
Mishkin went on to note that Trump “obviously came really, really close. But the fact that he didn’t overtake him — this is statistics. I think that the model proved to be right because he didn’t take over. So our minds were comfortable with that call. In the end, the stomachs were churning. But the mind still said [Biden] was going to win.”
The Decision Desk chief subsequently told the outlet that when the Arizona call was made, he “did not think the election was over.”
“I know some people thought the election was over. I thought that the election was still a dogfight in the Electoral College,” he added. “Trump’s lead in Pennsylvania was something that, based on our data, it wasn’t clear that Biden could take over.”
