Election Maps
Part of my job is to make maps. So after the election it was only natural for me to find out how the whole thing would look on a map. There are many cartographers doing the same thing, and as many ways to look at it. I began collecting them. And of course, friends began sending me election maps they found on the web.
Here's the best of what I've found. I'll attribute where it's known, and apologize for posting the work of others when it's not known.
First, for grins, here are a couple of similar tongue in cheek versions of how the country might look to some people.
On a scarier note, there's this one.
Following is a combination of the county changes map I posted last week, and the basic red counties versus blue counties. The key tells you how to read it (map by me).
If you only look at the above map you could get the mistaken impression that all the people in blue counties voted for Kerry, and all the people in red ones voted for Bush. Common sense, though, tells you that every county had various proportions that voted for each candidate.
This excellent map was done by Robert J. Vanderbei at Princeton to show the relative strengths of each candidate in every county. The redder the county, the more people voted for Bush, and vice versa. It's a much friendlier way to look at the election, and much less depressing.
Christa at Not Watching Television took this a step farther. She recognized that a lot of the distortion we see in the straight red/blue county or state map is due to the fact that Kerry won big in small counties that have a large population, and much of the Bush vote came from large geographic area counties with sparse population. The following two maps try to correct for this visually.
In the first, the states are distorted in size to reflect a larger or smaller population.
Finally, this monster does the same thing - using the degrees of purple metaphor above - distorting the counties so their size reflects their population.
A lot of food for thought.
5:14:59 PM 
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