A couple of interesting election result maps

11/06/2008
from http://www-personal.umich.edu/~mejn/election/2008/:

The candidate receiving a majority of the votes in the electoral college wins the election. The electors are apportioned roughly according to states' populations, as measured by the census, but with a small but deliberate bias in favor of smaller states.

We can represent the effects of the electoral college by scaling the sizes of states to be proportional to their number of electoral votes, which gives a map that looks like this:


One way to improve the map and reveal more nuance in the vote is to use not just two colors, red and blue, but to use red, blue, and shades of purple in between to indicate percentages of votes. Here is what the normal map looks like if you do this:


and finally i will let this map speak for itself:

red areas shifted more republican since 2004, blue areas shifted more democratic:

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