not watching television: Election result maps

November 07, 2004

Election result maps

My favorite episode of The West Wing is the one where a group of cartographers visits the White House on Big Block of Cheese Day and show CJ how the West's traditional Mercator Projection view of the world is biased and inaccurate. Most school maps and text books depict the Earth's land masses as looking like this:

But, as the cartographers for social equality explain to CJ, according to the Peterson Projection, the world more accurately looks like this:

Or even like this, since there really is no particular right-side-up when you consider the planet as it exists in space:

Either way, what you notice is that the Peterson Projection depicts South America, Africa, India, etc., as a lot larger that Mercator while North America, Europe and northern Asia have been, well, cut down to size by quite a bit.

My personal favorite cartographic attempt to put the world in a more accurate perspective is the Fuller Projection. I like Buckminster Fuller's Dymaxion Map because it both compensates for Mercator's distortions and captures our inter-relatedness by depicting the globe's land masses as an island archipelago surrounded by a single sea (though even Bucky's map privileges North over South):

Satmapposter4

The point of all this, of course, is that the world is not always what it seems, and particular interest groups often have, y'know, an interest in seeing to it that we see things a certain way.

Which brings me to a couple of maps of the recent election results that's been making the rounds of late.

First, foremost and most frequently, we're shown this map, where America's big, red, pulsing "heartland" appears to be pushing the poor, anemic blue state off to the extremities.

And, as if that wasn't scary enough, we're occasionally shown a map that distributes the blue and red to show how the vote broken down by county. According to the county map we Blues look like we're wandering in a wilderness of red-dom, lost souls scattered on the right-wing frontier.

Dave Pollard, who's How to Change the World blog I usually find so inspiring, actually sent a similar map out by email that had me scanning the web frantically for escape routes -- or at least ex-patriot sites where I could offer up my daughters as mail-order brides.

Fortunately, before I started laying plans for how to smuggle my 84-year-old, walker-bound mom across some border, I stopped by Crooked Timber, where Henry posted a map and a link to some analysis that thankfully helped me get a grip -- and a bit of that social equality perspective the Peterson Projection folks lectured CJ Craig about.

For one thing, according to Michael Gaster, Cosma Shalizi and Mark Newman of the University of Michigan, when you create a cartogram of the state electoral results, scaling the states according to population rather than geographic size, the map ends up looking like this instead of like the one above:

When viewed this way, through the lens of population distribution, America's electoral portrait changes quite a bit.

But that's not all. When the folks at U of M constructed a county-by-county picture of the vote, based on the percentage of votes cast for each candidate instead of just the winner-take-all results, they ended up with a cartogram like this:

Because this cartogram registers voting percentages by county, it reveals something important that those interests I mentioned above might not want to talk about. There are very few solidly red areas on this map, which means there are few solidly red areas in the country.

Those geographic electoral maps can come in handy for folks interested in claiming a mandate; or discouraging the opposition; or promoting a bandwagon effect. But just like the hemispheric distortions in Mercator Projection maps, what they depict is a far cry from reality.

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not watching television

November 07, 2004

Election result maps

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