Today I’m not doing a redrawing; I don’t need to. The magnificent Mark Newman, one of the authors of The Atlas of the Real World has done it for me.

Since my redrawing of the Presidential Candidates’ Tax Plans has drawn a political crowd, I thought I’d post this one, just in case there’s anyone who hasn’t seen it yet.

First, an election map in the usual style:

Next, instead of solid red and blue for the winner, let’s show a gradient through purple to indicate the strength of support one way or the other. Further, we can increase the granularity of the map by showing results by county instead of state. To clarify (as Tufte avers), add detail.

Finally, let’s scale each county by its population, to show the distribution of votes to human scale:

Lovely!

Further - we can now compare a cartogram produced on the same principles for the 2004 election:

More of these marvellous Creative Commons licensed cartographical adventures at Mark Newman’s website.