elections – Page 4 – The Map Room

Mapping Clinton and Trump’s Upside Potential (Whatever That Means)

Published on 24 October 20168 November 2016 by Jonathan Crowe

Earlier this month FiveThirtyEight built a county-by-county model showing where both Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump’s “upside potential” — by which they meant where they would each benefit from the shifts in the electoral landscape. Compared to 2012, Clinton is underperforming with non-college-educated whites and Trump is underperforming with Asians, African-Americans, Latinos and college educated whites.

To get a handle on how these shifts could affect the electoral landscape, we modeled how many of Romney’s votes came from college-educated whites and minorities and how many of Obama’s votes came from non-college-educated whites in each state, county and congressional district. The difference between these two vote totals, shown in the map above, can tell us where Clinton and Trump have the most potential to build on 2012.

The authors went on to game out what that might look like in terms of the electoral vote if one in five voters in those shifting groups switched allegiances.

Trump, Clinton and the Gender Gap

Published on 12 October 20168 November 2016 by Jonathan Crowe

A pronounced gender split is emerging in the 2016 U.S. presidential election. Based on national polls in October, Nate Silver writes, “on average, Clinton leads Trump by 15 percentage points among women while trailing him by 5 points among men. How would that look on the electoral map?” Silver does a quick-and-dirty estimation by adding or subtracting 10 points to/from the FiveThirtyEight forecast. Moving 10 points to Clinton’s column approximates what the electoral map would look like if only women voted:

Moving those 10 points to Trump’s column approximates the results if only men voted:

You’ve almost certainly seen these maps make the rounds of social media. This is where they came from and how they were made.

‘There Is More to Gerrymandering Than Ugly Shapes’

Published on 13 June 201614 June 2016 by Jonathan Crowe

On the liberal political blog Daily Kos, Stephen Wolf argues that it takes more than a weirdly shaped electoral district to make a gerrymander:

Land does not vote and we can’t judge gerrymanders simply based on geometry. Districts aren’t just abstract shapes on a map, but collections of actual people and voters. Ultimately, the outcomes produced by a particular map matter far more than a map’s appearance. Comparing the actual congressional districts to plausible alternatives in Maryland and other states demonstrates both how gerrymandering is more complex than merely grotesque shapes, and that Maryland is far from the worst partisan gerrymander nationwide.

Fantasy Football and Election Maps

Published on 30 March 2016 by Jonathan Crowe

Development Seed’s Anna Scalamonga discusses the work they did on the Washington Post’s live interactive election maps. “Our challenge was to build a real-time data app that engages users and make it easy to track the most important information. Inspired by interactions and visual presentation from fantasy football apps, we designed tools for live election tracking that make it clear when the data is changing and provide contextual information to make these changes understandable.”

Cartastrophe on Decision Desk HQ’s Election Cartograms

Published on 15 March 2016 by Jonathan Crowe

On Cartastrophe, Daniel Huffman points out the problems in Decision Desk HQ’s interactive cartograms for the U.S. presidential primaries, which maintain a state’s shape but resize the counties as the results come in. “Unfortunately, in so doing, they shuffle the counties around any old which way. The Lower Peninsula of Michigan has 68 counties in reality, the Upper Peninsula has 15. But Decision Desk HQ has shoved most of the counties into the Upper Peninsula, which now has 58, vs. 25 that remain in the Lower Peninsula,” Huffman writes. “This means that we can’t really see spatial patterns, which is sort of the point of having a map.” [via]

The Cartography Behind Super Tuesday

Published on 9 March 20168 November 2016 by Jonathan Crowe

Further to my last post, here’s a New York Times article on the technology behind their Super Tuesday election map.

There was a time, not too long ago, when our Super Tuesday map would have been impossible to put together and display. Even earlier in the digital era, a complete vote-totals map wouldn’t have been available until every ballot was counted at the end of the night. (Not to mention that in the print-only era, no map would be available until two days after the vote, and then often only in black and white.)

The New York Times Maps the U.S. Presidential Primaries

Published on 9 March 20168 November 2016 by Jonathan Crowe

The New York Times graphics department invariably does first-rate work, and their interactive maps of the U.S. presidential primary and caucus results are no exception. You can zoom in, you can get results by county or congressional district (depending on the state), you can choose to view margin of victory (see screencaps below) or each candidate’s vote share.

The Democratic candidates as of March 9:

nyt-primary-d

And the Republican candidates:

nyt-primary-r

The Facebook Primary

Published on 4 March 20168 November 2016 by Jonathan Crowe

FiveThirtyEight maps the Facebook likes of the U.S. presidential candidates: “If Facebook likes were votes, Bernie Sanders would be on pace to beat Hillary Clinton nationwide by a nearly 3-to-1 margin and Donald Trump to garner more support than Ted Cruz and Marco Rubio combined. Anything seems possible this year, but, still, be careful how you interpret these numbers: Facebook likes are not votes.” They ain’t kidding—Ben Carson?! [via]

Super Tuesday Results by County

Published on 2 March 20168 November 2016 by Jonathan Crowe

Of the maps of the Democratic and Republican U.S. presidential primary and caucus results I’ve seen so far, I rather like the county-by-county maps done by Reddit user Mainstay17. Here’s one for the Democrats that includes the results from the Super Tuesday states:

And here’s the equivalent map for the Republicans:

(Before you start, errors have already been pointed out in the Reddit comments here and here. Presumably there will be updates.)