This is how you can tell on election night who is on the right path to victory

Will the candidate in the lead actually win? That’s the crucial question as you watch the votes roll in on election night – especially in a race that’s expected to be close. And since competitions take place all over the country, it can be difficult to understand all the results!

With that in mind, we created the 538 precinct-level benchmarks as a sort of check on a party’s performance to give us a sense of whether a state could be in play when votes are counted on November 5th. The benchmarks estimate what percentage of votes Democrats or Republicans would need in each county to roughly break a tie in a statewide race. That is, if a candidate consistently performs better than their party’s benchmark because we get a significant number of candidates (keeping in mind that the partisan breakdown of early candidates can shift significantly as the count progresses), that’s a good one Signs that the candidate is on track to come out on top in the final result. Click here to view the full interactive display.