Comments | rhetoretician: Electoral Maps

rhetoretician

Electoral Maps

Aug 28, 2008 20:11

Those of you who haven't known me for four or eight years don't know of my obsession with electoral vote-counting. I developed an electoral map in which the area of each state is the same as its electoral votes, and I color-coded it to show the current polling data from each state. Using the altered map gives you a much clearer idea of where the ( Read more... )

elections, maps, electoral votes, politics, john mccain, barak obama

Comments 9

that_writr August 29 2008, 00:45:21 UTC

Thanks for this. I'm a political junkie. I'm watching Jim Lehrer cover the convention, and have been pretty much glued to my set for the past 4 nights (class aside).

rhetoretician August 29 2008, 01:03:02 UTC

You're very welcome. How did you find me?

that_writr August 29 2008, 01:17:36 UTC

Oh, sorry. Via Minisinoo, who recommended some of your work and mentioned you're also a college professor. There seems to be a lot of grad students and professors in fanfiction. I find it interesting; I've been browsing their journals. Thanks again for posting that. I don't say much (I'm still figuring out this whole live journal thing), but that got me excited.

girlspell August 29 2008, 01:09:14 UTC

Interesting to say the least. Everything seems to change on a dime though. Anything either candidate says intentinal or not. The should muddle up the map. That core strech of the west still is Republican though.

Love to see the reaction to Obama speech.

Let me leave you with these words....

*No way, no how, no Mccain*.

Your history girlspell August 29 2008, 22:34:42 UTC

Kennth, Jenny Boylan here. I love following your prognostications. I am as obsessed with maps, and with politics, as you are ( ... )

Re: Your history rhetoretician August 30 2008, 12:29:05 UTC

Hi Jenny. The maps you can trust. The prognostications you shouldn't. If I could accurately predict the outcome of events like elections I would be a very wealthy man by now. So what you can trust, if trust is the issue, is that I'm doing my best to give a realistic week-by-week picture. More than that? *Shrugs ( ... )

rhetoretician August 30 2008, 11:56:07 UTC

Hi Rachel,

I agree. Little things change a lot. What interests me is the cracks in the solid south, for example.

tunxeh August 30 2008, 05:27:25 UTC

Cartograms!!
Did you lay yours out by hand or find some software to do it?

(Is it wrong that I care more about that than the actual information content? Though your point about the states being more polarized this time around is an interesting one too.)

rhetoretician August 30 2008, 12:40:07 UTC

Hi! I created the original map by hand in Visio, which has a perimeter/area function, and updated it after the 2000 census came out. Then I just change the colors as the polls change, which is pretty easy. I have a different one that someone did in Excel (number of cells = number of electoral votes), and its advantage is that it looks a bit more like the U.S., but it's a lot more time consuming to do the color fill for that one.

I'm fascinated by cartograms and data methodology too. Back in the days when I had an administrative job, my office wall was plastered with a few dozen colorful charts of admissions data. Someday I'd like to create something as eloquent as Minard's famous map of Napoleon's march.