Check out this article at Sciam.Com with 7 different maps showing the presidential election results. My favorite is also the most processed: this is a county-by-county reflection of how "blue" (Obama) or how "red" (McCain) people voted, using shades of purple to show the degree. (For example, a 60-40 win for Obama will show as a bluer shade of purple than an outright 50-50 split.) The counties have also been resized to reflect their population, instead of their land area. The standard state-by-state all-red or all-blue geographically-sized electoral map gives many false impressions: it implies uniformity of views in states, it suggests battle-lines being drawn between parts of the country, and it suggests that vast swaths of American farmland and forest is full of McCain voters (instead of non-voting boar and squirrel). So while this view takes some getting used to, it better represents the human reality.
Some kind of fun things I noticed: the San Francisco Bay Area is HUGE, even compared to the rest of California. There are many voters there. Same is true of the out-sized Florida and the super-huge Northeast. You can see Broward County (us) in Florida is bluer than either Miami-Dade or Palm Beach counties, to our South and North, but only by about a shade. By this view, Texas is tiny.
Labels: election 2008, electoral map