Most states are purple

About a year and a half ago (August 2005), having had discussions with many people about the supposedly new polarization of America’s population into red and blue states, and looking for a better visualization of the actual results, I was pleased to find the following website. The authors at Univ. of Mich. carefully describe some more accurate ways of portraying the proportions of votes in the last presidential election, where — like in most elections — the majorities were as often slim as they were wide. For the explanation behind the attached purple proportional cartogram, please see http://www-personal.umich.edu/~mejn/election/.

This sequence shows a progression from winner-takes-all state votes in 2004, to county votes, to shading by proportion of votes, to scaling the counties by the number of votes in them.

Having recently returned to my home state — long known for its extreme conservatism — after an absence of almost eight years, I was surprised at the broad mix of colors there, and particularly by the fact that my county was NOT the reddest county on the map…. though it was still quite non-blue. On the other hand, some places are just plain predictable — e.g. Provo and S.F./Berkeley.

At the time, I asked the authors about extending the study to several previous elections, and then devising a visually informative method of displayingtrends and changes over time (or we could make an animated GIF, I suppose). But I received no response. I guess it takes a lot of grad students to enter all that data… ;o}