As I wrote the other day, when reporting state results, instead of saying, “With 14% of the precincts in, X percent of the vote is going to Mitt Romney,” they should say, “With 14% of the precincts in, the swing is Y percent toward the Republican ticket.” This would be much more informative, considering that those 14% are not a random sample of precincts. I don’t know why they don’t report the swing. I have the impression that they do it that way in Britain.
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agree – I’ve always found this weird. In Germany they report what they call extrapolations (“Hochrechnung”) and you never even see the current vote tally. Expecting people to know in which states you expect results to move which way (“Virginia will start leaning strongly Republican and then gradually shift, Ohio the other way around” etc.) seems completely unreasonable.
Yes, on election night in Britain it’s all about swing.
However…
Unlike in the US, the media in UK ( or Canada) actually report national aggregations of district votes by party. Imagine that.