The presidential election is only a few days away. Many people will be on the edge of their seats when the vote results are pouring in. What if a candidate has an early lead in a swing state? Does that always signal a strong performance? Not necessarily, for close races, which the swing states will likely be.
That could be due to a larger relative share of votes being counted in one candidate’s strongholds early on than the other’s. So one performance metric to look at to try to avoid this misconception is to look at the candidate’s margin in various regions across the state. If they have poor margins in those areas but are leading in the total votes across the state, that might not necessarily suggest they are the favorite.
Turnout could also affect the race and it could throw off predictions. Even if you know approximately how much percent of votes have been counted in a county or region, that could be inaccurate because it might be the case that overall voter turnout in that area was higher than expected.