"call the race" in the election [closed]

What is the meaning of call in call the race? I know that call the race roughly means announcing the winner, right? I found this term appears frequently in the many artiles about the US presidential election. For example:

The Associated Press has not called this race.

Races are called when a winner is clear.

Solution 1:

'Call' has a bewildering number of senses, some conflicting. Collins Cobuild, for instance, gives (their sense 8)

call ... [8] [verb] If someone in authority calls something such as a meeting, rehearsal, or election, they arrange for it to take place at a particular time.

But this of course is not the sense involved here; your examples are closer to Macmillan's sense 9:

call ... [9] to say [with conviction] what you think will happen, for example in politics or business

[often as] hard/difficult to call:

• The situation in the East is hard to call.

However, your Associated Press quotes, as their article makes clear, certainly uses 'call' to mean 'announce a definite result' (in the expressions 'call a race / an election ...') rather than 'predict a near-certain result'. I've not found this in a dictionary (though the far broader 'announce' is usually given).

AHD gets closest of those I've looked at:

call [15] To indicate or characterize accurately in advance; predict:

• It is often difficult to call the outcome of an election. [bolding mine]