Fox News Decision Desk Director Arnon Mishkin
Fox News Decision Desk Director Arnon Mishkin angered President Donald Trump and delighted Democrats on Election Night 2020 when he called the critical battleground state of Arizona for Joe Biden, sealing Biden’s victory. Two years later, Mishkin says “his gut” is telling him Election Night 2022 may leave Democrats with a hangover.
“The Democrats had a great summer,” Mishkin told Fox’s Martha MacCallum Tuesday on her podcast, The Untold Story. “Everything went their way politically, which is to say inflation looked like it was abating. The court decision on abortion came down, which energized Democratic voters. Since September 1? Not so much. Inflation turns out to still be around. Crime is still an issue, and people may have forgotten about, you know, the abortion anger, if you will. So my my gut has been sort of leaning in in the red direction.”
In 2020, Mishkin joined me on my podcast and explained to me how the Fox News Decision Desk works, and why he believed—correctly, as it turned out—that Fox would have an advantage over other networks in making critical calls on Election Night. For the mid-terms, Mishkin says there are signs Democrats could pull off some upsets, but it’s the GOP that has the upper hand as voters go to the polls.
“Some of these numbers are a little—there’s a little more strength to the Democrats than we thought,” he said. “And so I’m somewhere in the range between it could be a very good night for the Republicans to a surprising night, at least in some ways, for the Democrats. That’s what my story and I’m sticking to it.”
Mishkin says he expects Latino voters to play a critical role in how some of the most contested races are decided, but he doesn’t see those voters—despite widespread reporting of a “shifting Latino vote” toward Republicans—breaking together as a unified voting block. “I think that’s absolutely what you saw in 2020 with with the significant support, not majority support, but significant support that Trump got in the Hispanic community,” he said. “A lot of it was that they were behaving, they were voting not like Hispanic people, because they were voting as Americans. And what you see is that they start behaving like other Americans and they split based on college level, level of education and urbanity, whether that live in rural areas or urban areas.”
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One other trend Mishkin expects to repeat from 2020: election results that trend toward Republicans early, then begin moving toward Democrats as early and absentee ballots are counted. “You’re going to have the same situation. You are I mean, we have no idea how the election is going to turn out in Pennsylvania tonight,” Mishkin said. “But I would suspect that tonight, the first returns we see from Pennsylvania are going to be more red, more Republican than the final count will wind up being.”
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Mishkin says the same pattern will happen—only in reverse—in states like Georgia and Florida, both with hugely important statewide and national races that likely won’t be decided on Election Night. “So in states like Florida, you could easily see that they’re going to count the early vote first. They’re going to dump it in first. And you’re going to see the early vote counts you see from Florida are going to look more blue, more Democratic, then the final count is going to be. You’re also going to see that in Georgia, where I think you’re going to see some what I call a blue skew to the vote count at the beginning of the night. And if the Republicans take over and win those seats, it’ll be because the later counted vote, which is the Election Day vote.”
Mark Joyella, Senior Contributor
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