How to tell who's on track to win on election night

Will the candidate who is leading actually win? That's the overriding question when watching vote returns come in on election night — especially in a race that's expected to be close. And with contests happening across the country, it can be tough to make sense of all the results!

With this in mind, we created 538's county-level benchmarks as a sort of back-of-the-envelope check for how a party is performing, to help give us a sense of whether a state might be in play as votes are tallied on Nov. 5. The benchmarks estimate what percentage of the vote Democrats or Republicans would need in each county for a statewide race to be roughly tied. That means if a candidate is performing consistently better than their party's benchmark as we get a meaningfully large number of returns (keeping in mind that the partisan split from early returns may shift significantly as the count continues), it's a decent sign that contender is on track to come out ahead in the final results. Click here to view the full interactive.