Archive for November 15, 2008

No, It’s Not a Rorschach; It’s Your Country

Posted by didionsmommy ⋅ November 15, 2008 ⋅ Leave a Comment

Yep, it looks like splats of tempera paint on the floor of a third-grade classroom, but this picture actually shows 2008 presidential election results in the “lower 48,” courtesy of three researchers at the University of Michigan. The map is actually a cartogram, where states, more specifically counties, are reshaped according to population density and colored based on total votes.

The electoral maps we are glued to during election night are colored in a win/lose manner. A state is either blue or red, when actually, much of the country (especially the large middle swath, long considered a Republican stronghold) is quite evenly divided. We’re some shade of purple … blue-purple if we are leaning left, red-purple if we are leaning right. What is notable is how small the areas are that are dramatically red. Much more of the map is blue or very near-blue. Considering Obama’s mandate-size win by over eight million votes, more blue on the map makes sense.

Also interesting is how little the general voting pattern has changed since 2004 (see below). Essentially, the country is just as purple in 2008 as it was then, the difference is between the percentage of blue or red in the purple. Unfortunately, we don’t have a cartogram representing 2000 presidential results, but since Gore won the popular vote by over 500,000 votes, I think we can expect to see the same overall pattern.

So what about the Republican/conservative assertion that the country is really center-right? Looking at these maps, I think it is clear that the country is actually center-left, given the relative size of areas that are on the blue-purple end of the red-to-blue spectrum.