New York (AFP)

Engaged in an election that drags on, the big American chains follow the count as closely as possible and engage in the risky game of projections, hoping to avoid the misstep.

Tuesday, 11:20 p.m.

Fox News announces the victory of Democratic candidate Joe Biden in Arizona.

Donald Trump is fuming, reports the New York Times.

If he loses this state, which he won in 2016, his horizon will darken significantly.

Political advisor to the president, Jason Miller makes several calls to Fox News, several of whose hosts are pro-Trump, asking them to retract, according to the New York daily.

Donald Trump's son-in-law Jared Kushner even calls Rupert Murdoch, no less than the chairman of the Fox Group.

But nothing helps.

Fox News maintains its projection, alone among the big chains.

To get started, it relied on its "decision desk", a team of dozens of statisticians and analysts who supply the antenna with estimates and results, as with all its competitors.

Already in 2018, Fox News made its mark by announcing, several hours ahead of its rivals, that the Democrats had obtained a majority in the House of Representatives after the mid-term legislative elections.

The channels all have in mind November 7, 2000 and the about-face that had to be done after the premature announcement of a victory for Democrat Al Gore in the decisive state of Florida.

A nightmare for their credibility.

"In the end, Fox could have been right, but their initial decision was probably premature," said Costas Panagopoulos, professor of political science at Northeastern University and member of the "decision desk" of NBC.

Decision desks have "enormous pressure to deliver fair results," he explains, "but they also have pressure to communicate them quickly, and each finds a different balance between the two."

"We are not racing," said Sam Feist, chief of the Washington bureau of CNN in mid-October, during a round table organized by the PEN America association.

"It would be counterproductive for all of us. We know we have to wait for the numbers to come out."

- No magic -

The rise of early voting (by mail or in person), observed for a long time but accelerated by the pandemic this year, has forced teams to change their methods.

The importance of the polls carried out on polling day itself at the exit of the polling stations, once an absolute barometer, has thus been significantly reduced.

For the 2020 presidential election, the teams called thousands of voters who had voted early in order to decipher, as much as possible, this part of the ballot.

This is how they discovered that this early vote was overwhelmingly Democratic and understood that the ballots cast on the day of the election would likely be rather favorable to the incumbent president.

Today, aggregate results and projections come from two major poles in the United States.

On the one hand, the consortium formed by Fox News and the AP agency.

On the other, the National Election Pool (NEP), on which CNN, ABC, CBS and NBC are based.

This explains why, on Thursday afternoon, Fox News and AP were still alone in declaring Joe Biden the winner in Arizona.

From which constituency come the ballots still to be counted?

What is the trend there so far?

How many are early votes?

What are the results of the previous elections?

This is what prompted Fox News and AP to take the plunge, the two explaining that according to their models, Donald Trump could not catch up.

"There is no magic in the projections", explained on CNN in early October, Jennifer Agiesta, head of electoral results for the news channel.

"It's sad, but it's just math."

© 2020 AFP