Maps and cartograms of the 2004 US presidential election results

[struggle4progress]

Michael Gastner, Cosma Shalizi, and Mark Newman
University of Michigan

On election night and in the days since then, we have seen many maps that look like this ...


... this is misleading because it fails to take into account the fact that most of the red states have small populations, whereas most of the blue states have large ones. The blue may be small in area, but they are large in terms of numbers of people, 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 have been rescaled according to their population. That is, states are drawn with a size proportional not to their sheer topographic acreage -- which has little to do with politics -- 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 ...


... But we can go further. We can do the same thing also with the county-level election results <snip> One possible way ... suggested by Robert Vanderbei ... 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 ...


And here's what the cartogram looks like

<snip>

http://www-personal.umich.edu/~mejn/election/