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| MINDBLOWING 3-D Election 2012 Map by Robert Vanderbei, Princeton University |
GUEST BLOG-- By Will Femia on The MaddowBlog.MSMBC.com
Editor’s note: This is an excellent, excellent and
much needed piece of blog journalism compiled by MSNBC. Originally titled “This
is what democracy looks like.” It appeared on November 15, 2012. Go to the
original posting so you can check out the maps and data embedded in the MSNBC
blog: http://maddowblog.msnbc.com/_nv/more/section/archive?author=willfemia
The blog is reprinted here without the embedded
links.
By Will Femia--If you are a blue voter, you are surely aware of the criticism of red
state/blue state maps that the balance is improperly displayed because many of
the red states in the middle of the country have a lot of land but not very
many voters, so giving those states a large area on a map is misleading.
Mark Newman Map
My favorite solution to
this problem has always been the Spider-Man-looking county-by-county cartogram
scaled to population or electoral vote size, like the one above by Mark Newman
of the Department of Physics and Center for the Study of Complex Systems at the
University of Michigan. The above shows "a color scale that ranges from
red for 70% Republican or more, to blue for 70% Democrat or more." Plus,
it's Spider-Man-like. Meet me on the other side for not only the best map yet,
but another one that's a real mindblower [next.]
This [week], io9 shared another solution to the problem:
a Goldsberry map by John Nelson.
John Nelson Map
Nelson plotted a red or
blue dot for every hundred votes for President Obama or Mitt Romney. You can
see a bigger version here but I think it works best when you see the whole
country and general patterns are visible (can you see the black belt?) along
with a stark depiction of just how sparse the population is in those big red
areas.
Unfortunately the details
in the more heavily populated areas are lost in purple mud, so there's not much
to see if you look really close.
Chris Howard Map
Enter Chris Howard, a
fantasy and science fiction author and illustrator who took the
county-by-county map by Mark Newman and overlaid population density data from
other sources to make the clearest picture I've seen of Purple America.*
[Robert Vanderbei Map]
Now for the mindblower: Among the sources Howard cites in his explanation of his map is
Princeton University's Robert J. Vanderbei (Note to self, go back and play with
his faculty page later). Vanderbei's solution to showing the population
differences without distorting the geography is to render the population data
into a third dimension on a spinning 3D map. NOTE: The file is 55MB, so after
you click, it takes a while to load. Here's the direct link: http://www.princeton.edu/~rvdb/WebGL/Election2012f.html
*I've put a copy of the
large version of the Chris Howard map on our media servers as well, to
hopefully share some of the hosting burden, but please use the Chris Howard
links as the credit is all his. www.facebook.com/photo.php?fbid=10151321923986667&set=a.53699096666.80512.605431666&type=1&theater
End of MSNBC
blog.
Maps of
the 2012 US presidential election results
By Mark Newman, University
of Michigan.
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:
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.
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.
FOR THE COMPLETE NEWMAN MAP BLOG GO TO: http://www-personal.umich.edu/~mejn/election/2012/
Credits:
--John Nelson Image source:
uxblog.idvsolutions.com
--Mark Newman Image source:
http://www-personal.umich.edu/~mejn/election/2012/
--Chris Howard Image source:
http://www.saltwaterwitch.com/img/WhatAmericaLooksLike-2012Election-ChrisHoward.jpg
--Robert Vanderbei Image Source: http://www.princeton.edu/~rvdb/WebGL/Election2012f.html
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