US Election Cartogram
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.
November 8th, 2008 at 1:08 am
I think these cartograms are very interesting. I’ve looked at electoral maps, and the red swaths through the middle of the US are far larger than the blue edges on the left and right coasts. I saw one of Mark’s cartograms which scaled the states by their Electoral College representation, and it showed a much more even distribution. It also reminded me how densely we’re packed together up here in the Northeast.
November 8th, 2008 at 9:12 am
‘Twould be awesome if we could somehow subtract the 2004 county cartogram from the 2008 to see the degree of swing…