The New York Times Graphics Department was recognized at the 25th Malofiej International Infographics Awards, where the jury awarded the special Miguel Urabayen Award for the best map to two Times
New York Times Maps Receive Infographic Award
Category: Politics
The Economist’s Democracy Index
Here’s The Economist’s interactive map of their Economist Intelligence Unit’s Democracy Index. Its 2016 iteration, released last week, downgrades the United States to a “flawed democracy”—a drop from 8.05 to 7.98 in the index, where 8 is the threshold between flawed and full democracy. (While many developed countries score higher, not all do: France is at 7.92, and Belgium is at 7.77; Japan is practically tied at 7.99.)
Duck Dynasty and Donald Trump
Last month the New York Times mapped the U.S. cultural divide by looking at television viewing preferences. More precisely, the geographic distribution of viewership for the 50 most-liked TV shows. The correlation between Duck Dynasty fandom and voting for Trump was higher than for any other show. More surprisingly, the show most correlated with voting for Clinton? Family Guy.
American Nations Applied to the 2016 Election
Writing for the Portland Press-Herald, Colin Woodard compares the 2016 presidential election results to the eleven regional cultures he sets out in his 2011 book, American Nations. “The bottom line: the 2016 presidential election results exhibited the same regional patterning we’ve seen in virtually all competitive contests in our history, including those in 2008 and 2012. But by running on an unconventional platform, Donald Trump was able to erode his rival’s margins in certain nations.” He did better enough in rural Yankeedom and the Midlands to deny Clinton the victory in states she could not afford to lose. With plenty of maps to show the swing from the 2008 and 2012 votes. [Cartophilia]
Previously: Electoral Map What-Ifs.
A Giant Map for Presidential Inauguration Planning
The U.S. military uses a huge floor map of Washington, D.C. to plan for presidential inaugurations, as the Tech Insider video above shows. According to this, it’s used by the Armed Forces Inaugural Committee, a joint-service organization that provides military ceremonial support. (See this U.S. Army article from 2012 about the 2013 inauguration, and this 2008 Pruned blog post about the 2009 inauguration.) [Tim Wallace]
Electoral Map What-Ifs
Neil Freeman’s Random States of America creates election maps from an alternate reality. They apply real-world election results to randomly generated state boundaries, which can yield radically different results than what actually happened.
Taking things one step further, Josh Wallaert of Places asked Freeman “to calculate who would win the 2016 election if the states were redrawn under plausible scenarios.” The result is a collection of electoral might-have-beens based on familiar scenarios: Pearcy’s 38 states, Freeman’s 50 states with equal population, even the megaregions based on commuter data we saw earlier this month. Each map demonstrates that, under the U.S. system, who wins depends on where you draw the borders.
Austrian Presidential Election Cartograms
The second round re-vote of the Austrian presidential election took place yesterday. (The first round took place on 24 April; a repeat of the second round, narrowly won by Alexander Van der Bellen on 22 May, was ordered by the Constitutional Court.) Full, final results are not yet available, but austromorph.space has created the above cartogram of the preliminary results—showing, as you might expect, the strength of winning independent candidate Alexander Van der Bellen in the cities; support for the far-right FPÖ’s Norbert Hofer shrinks when you change from a map to a cartogram.
There are other cartograms of earlier rounds of the Austrian presidential election on the austromorph.space website.
Mapping Post-Election Violence in the U.S.
Crisis mapper Ushahidi is turning its focus to the United States, with an interactive map that collects reports of post-election violence, hate speech, protests and harassment. [The Verge]
Mapping Ineligible Voters
Last year Neil Freeman produced a map of ineligible voters in the United States. “There are three main groups of people who aren’t eligible to vote: children, non-citizens, and disenfranchised felons. The Census does a survey of voting age and citizenship, this map uses 2013 estimates.”
3D Election Maps
Mapping U.S. election results by county and state is a bit different than mapping results by electoral or congressional district, because counties and states don’t have (roughly) equal populations. Choropleth maps are often used to show the margin of victory, but to show the raw vote total, some election cartographers are going 3D.
Max Galka of Metrocosm has created an interactive 3D map of county-level results (above) using his Blueshift tool. The resulting map, called a prism map, uses height to show the number of votes cast in each county.
Here’s a similar 3D interactive map, but using state-level rather than county-level data, by Sketchfab member f3cr204. [Maps on the Web]
Downloading County-Level Election Results
Maps need data. Election maps need election results. Data journalist Simon Rogers looks at the challenges of laying hands on open, publicly available county-level election results for use in election maps.
The New York Times Maps the 2016 U.S. Presidential Election
The New York Times has a first-rate graphics department, and they’ve come up with some stunning ways to depict the 2016 U.S. presidential election results. They updated their maps of so-called “landslide counties” (see previous entry), which was straightforward enough. Their feature on how Trump reshaped the election map, with arrows showing the county-by-county swing (red and to the right for Trump, blue and to the left for Clinton), was unexpectedly good. But their maps of the Two Americas (above), imagining Trump’s America and Clinton’s America as separate countries, with bodies of water replacing the areas won by their opponents—Trump’s America is nibbled at the edges by coastlines and pockmarked by lakes; Clinton’s is an archipelago—is quite simply a work of art. Incredible, incredible work.
The Economist’s County-by-County Election Map
The Economist’s county-by-county election map is a standout because of its quick-acting slider: you can scroll quite quickly through 64 years of presidential elections. Their analysis also focuses on the urban/rural divide (there’s also a graph). [Benjamin Hennig]
U.S. Presidential Election Cartogram
I’ve delayed posting maps of the 2016 U.S. presidential election results because—well, because like many of you I’m still recovering. But here we go. We’ll start with Benjamin Hennig’s cartogram of the results which, as cartograms tend to do, correct for the urban concentrations that made up Hillary Clinton’s vote, and demonstrate the rural nature of Donald Trump’s support. See it at Geographical magazine and Hennig’s website.
The First TV Election Map
Are you used to seeing a big map behind the news anchors during election night coverage? As the Los Angeles Times reports, that’s something that began only in 1976, when NBC News commissioned a 14-foot-high plastic map that lit up (red for Democrats, blue for Republicans—the colors hadn’t been standardized yet) depending on who won the state. [Map Dragons]