But that, warned political experts, would probably be a “mirage.” Mr. Trump’s lead would shrink, they said, or perhaps evaporate entirely, as states tallied the mail-in ballots, which were favored by Democrats and take longer to count. A projected loss in traditionally red Arizona — which a Democratic presidential candidate had won only once since Harry Truman — coming from a presumably loyal outlet, augured a bad night. But Fox News had good reason to feel confident about a call no other news outlet was prepared to make at that point in the evening, with roughly one-fourth of the vote still uncounted in Arizona, Mr. Stirewalt said. After the 2016 election, Rupert Murdoch, who oversees Fox News as part of his larger conservative media empire, urged Fox to pull out of the consortium of news organizations that used polls to project results. On the night of the election, the Fox News decision desk compared those surveys with another layer of data: actual precinct-level vote tallies that the A.P.

Source: Fox News June 14, 2022 01:35 UTC