funny looking maps that give me a bit more faith in the american people

Maps and cartograms of 2004 US presidential election results

the map of the country that we have seen in the past week, the one with the red states overwhelming the blue ones 3:1, is somewhat misleading. this visual analysis does not take into account the population size of each state (and, as we all know, the population density of the red states is, in most cases, much less than that in the blue states).

here's a cartogram of the us, courtesy of some folks from the university of michigan, where the sizes of states have been rescaled according to their population.



this visual representation is a good indicator for what we already thought, that the election results were actually pretty evenly divided.


here's a cartogram of election results by county.



but the red still predominates. the authors of the source page say this:

Again, the blue areas are much magnified, and areas of blue and red are now nearly equal. However, there is in fact still more red than blue on this map, even after allowing for population sizes. Of course, we know that nationwide the percentages of voters voting for either candidate were almost identical, so what is going on here?

The answer seems to be that the amount of red on the map is skewed because there are a lot of counties in which only a slim majority voted Republican. One possible way to allow for this, suggested by Robert Vanderbei at Princeton University, is to use not just two colors on the map, red and blue, but instead to use red, blue, and shades of purple to indicate percentages of voters.

with this method, the map ends up looking like this.

In this map, it appears that only a rather small area is taken up by true red counties, the rest being mostly shades of purple with patches of blue in the urban areas.

somehow, this makes me feel a little more hopeful about the hearts and brains of the american people. a little.

link via incekt.