Perhaps, perhaps, perhaps

The New York Times is not known for being hyperbolic — at least among moderate readers. But its story today on early voting should raise eyebrows.

Hillary Clinton has established a slim edge over Donald J. Trump in early-voter turnout in several vital swing states, pressing her longstanding advantages in state-level organization and potentially mitigating the fallout from her campaign’s latest scrap with the F.B.I.

While this may be true, it is not something we can actually know based on the information available — which the fourth paragraph makes clear, or sort of.

At least 21 million people have voted so far across the country. In the states that are most likely to decide the election — among them Florida, Colorado and Nevada — close to a quarter of the electorate has already cast ballots. While their votes will not be counted until Election Day, registered Democrats are outperforming Republicans in key demographics and urban areas there and in North Carolina, where extensive in-person voting began late last week and which has emerged as one of the most closely contested battlegrounds for the White House and control of the Senate.

Essentially, what this Times story has done is conflate voters’ party registration with their ultimate voting preference. Democratic voters are Clinton voters, in this formulation, and Republican voters are Trump voters — even though the narrative is not quite so neat.

I’m not saying that the actual vote count will prove this lede to be false. That’s not the issue. The votes have not been counted and the only real information we have is that more registered Democrats have voted than registered Republicans and the lede should not have said anything more than that.