I haven’t seen many maps of the 2024 U.S. presidential election results, but then I haven’t been looking very hard for them either. Last week, CNN posted some charts and maps showing where the candidates under- or overperformed relative to the 2020 election. “Perhaps it shouldn’t be surprising that in the states where the campaign was the most hotly contested, more people voted in 2024, whereas in states where one side or the other seemed more likely to win, turnout generally dropped.”
The Map Men look at gerrymandering on U.S. electoral district maps. A reasonably comprehensive primer on the subject even if comes from a couple of Brits baffled by the subject. And they finish with a surprisingly sharp point: gerrymanderers wouldn’t know how to draw maps like these if voting intentions weren’t predictable.
A shoutout to Keir Clarke at Maps Mania, whose coverage of election maps is such that whenever I think, “hey, that country just had an election, I ought to write a post collecting some maps of the results,” I usually find that Keir has already beaten me to the punch.
Julien Gaffuri’s map of the second-round results of the French presidential election is, as you can see, extraordinarily busy—and, by the way, extremely processor-intensive: it will slow down your machine—because it’s at the commune level and each circle is scaled to population. (News flash: Paris has lots of people in it.) And those circles are striped circles: the proportion of the votes is indicated by the area taken up by a given colour. The map of the first round results shows more stripes (because more candidates) but is by department, so it’s a little easier both to read and to see how the striped circle format works. It’s an interesting alternative to a choropleth map, and a bit less ambiguous.
Mapbox is holding an election mapping challenge. Entrants are asked to create, using the Mapbox basemap and compatible tools and platforms, “an original, publicly viewable interactive map, map-based data visualization, or application that uses location tools and focuses on an elections-related theme.” Entries are due November 8, and must be accompanied by a public blog post explaining the project.
Previously: Mapbox Elections.
Kenneth Field’s virtual talk on the cartography of elections, given to University of South Carolina students on 25 September 2020, is now available on YouTube. “It explores the way in which map types and their design mediate the message, and using examples from elections shows different versions of the truth.” Also includes material from Ken’s forthcoming book.
This week Mapbox launched a tool for the upcoming 2020 U.S. elections: Mapbox Elections, “a resource to help individuals, journalists, and organizations cover the elections, analyze the results, and build modern maps to display it all.” Their first product is a dataset including U.S. presidential election results from 2004 to 2016.
