Election Maps by State
and County
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For a detailed look at the
voting decisions made state by state, county
by county, red to blue, this series of interactive maps from The
Washington Post
provides a 3-D version of the margin of victory
in this presidential election and then some.
Any
surprises?
Election
map by county 3D
Election
map by county
Tags:
2008
election,
blue
state,
election
map,
red
state
And the
blue wins?
______________________________________________________________________
Cartogram Maps of the 2012 US Presidential
Election Results
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(Thanks for all the emails. New county-by-county
maps are on the way soon.)
Election results by state
Most
of us are, by now, familiar with the maps the TV channels and web sites use to
show the results of presidential elections. Here is a typical map of the
results of the 2012 election:
Click on any of the maps for a larger picture
The
states are colored red or blue to
indicate whether a majority of their voters voted for the Republican candidate,
Mitt Romney, or the Democratic candidate, Barack Obama, respectively. Looking
at this map it gives the impression that the Republican won the election
handily, since there is rather more red on the map than there is blue. In fact,
however, the reverse is true – it was the Democrats who won the election. The
explanation for this apparent paradox, as pointed out by many people, is that
the map fails to take account of the population distribution. It fails to allow
for the fact that the population of the red states is on average significantly
lower than that of the blue ones. The blue may be small in area, but they
represent a large number of voters, which is what matters in an election.
We
can correct for this by making use of a cartogram, a map in which the
sizes of states are rescaled according to their population. That is, states are
drawn with size proportional not to their acreage but to the number of their
inhabitants, states with more people appearing larger than states with fewer,
regardless of their actual area on the ground. On such a map, for example, the
state of Rhode Island, with its 1.1 million inhabitants, would appear about
twice the size of Wyoming, which has half a million, even though Wyoming has 60
times the acreage of Rhode Island.
Here
are the 2012 presidential election results on a population cartogram of
this type:
As
you can see, the states have been stretched and squashed, some of them
substantially, to give them the appropriate sizes, though it's done in such a way
as to preserve the general appearance of the map, so far as that's possible. On
this map there is now clearly more blue than red.
The
presidential election, however, is not actually decided on the basis of the
number of people who vote for each candidate but on the basis of the electoral college.
Under the US electoral system, each state in the union contributes a certain
number of electors to the electoral college, who vote according to the majority
in their state. (Exceptions are the states of Maine and Nebraska, which use a
different formula that allows them to split their electoral votes between
candidates.) The candidate receiving a majority of the votes in the electoral
college wins the election. The electors are apportioned among the states
roughly according to population, as measured by the census, but with a small
but deliberate bias in favor of smaller states.
We
can represent the effects of the electoral college by scaling the sizes of
states to be proportional to their number of electoral votes, which gives a map
that looks like this:
This
cartogram looks similar to the one above it, but it's not identical.
Wyoming, for instance, has approximately doubled in size, precisely because of
the bias in favor of small states.
The
areas of red and blue on the cartogram are now proportional to the
actual numbers of electoral votes won by each candidate. Thus this map shows at
a glance both which states went to which candidate and which candidate won more
electoral college votes – something that you cannot tell easily from the normal
election-night red and blue map.
In
principle, one could also make similar maps of the county-by-county election
returns, but the county results are not yet available for the 2012 election.
Watch this space in the next day or two for new county-level maps.
Notes:
Frequently asked questions (FAQs): A list
of frequently asked questions concerning these maps, along with answers, can be
found here.
Software: My computer software for producing
cartograms is freely available here.
©
2012 M. E. J. Newman
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons License.
Text and images may be freely distributed. I'd appreciate hearing from you if
you make use of them.
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The
views expressed are personal and are not necessarily shared by the University
of Michigan.
Mark Newman, Department of
Physics and Center for the Study of Complex Systems, University of Michigan
Email: mejn@umich.edu
Updated: November 7, 2012