![]() ![]() However, this map is still somewhat misleading because we have colored every county either red or blue, as if every voter voted the same way. Here is what the cartogram looks like for the county-level election returns: Again, we can make a more helpful representation by using a cartogram. Now the effects we saw at the state level are even more pronounced: the red areas appear overwhelmingly in the majority, despite the closeness of the vote. Here is a map of US counties, again colored red and blue to indicate Republican and Democratic majorities respectively: We can do the same thing also with the county-level election results and the images are even more striking. There is more red than blue in this case, indicating that Donald Trump won the election – something you cannot easily tell from the normal election-night red and blue map. Thus this map shows at a glance both which states went to which candidate and which candidate won more electoral college votes. The areas of red and blue on the cartogram are now proportional to the actual numbers of electoral votes won by each candidate. Wyoming, for instance, has approximately doubled in size, precisely because of the bias in favor of states with smaller populations. ![]() ![]() This cartogram looks similar to the previous one, but it's not identical. Of states to be proportional to their number of electoral votes, which We can represent the effects of the electoral college by scaling the sizes The electors are apportioned among the states roughly according to population, as measured by the census, but with a small but deliberate bias in favor of less populous states. (Exceptions are the states of Maine and Nebraska, which use a different formula that allows them to split their electoral votes between candidates.) The candidate receiving a majority of the votes in the electoral college wins the election. Under the US electoral system, each state in the union contributes a certain number of electors to the electoral college, who vote according to the majority in their state. The presidential election, however, is not actually decided on the basis of the number of people who vote for each candidate but on the basis of the electoral college. On this map the total areas of red and blue are more similar, although there is still more red than blue overall. Here are the 2016 presidential election results on a population cartogramĪs you can see, the states have been stretched and squashed, some of them substantially, to give them the appropriate sizes, though it's done in such a way as to preserve the general appearance of the map, so far as that's possible. On such a map, for example, the state of Rhode Island, with its 1.1 million inhabitants, would appear about twice the size of Wyoming, which has half a million, even though Wyoming has 60 times the acreage of Rhode Island. That is, states are drawn with size proportional not to their acreage but to the number of their inhabitants, states with more people appearing larger than states with fewer, regardless of their actual area on the ground. We can correct for this by making use of a cartogram, a map in which the sizes of states are rescaled according to their population. The blue may be small in area, but they represent a large number of voters, which is what matters in an election. It fails to allow for the fact that the population of the red states is on average significantly lower than that of the blue ones. The explanation for this apparent paradox, as pointed out by many people, is that the map fails to take account of the population distribution. There is significantly more red on this map than there is blue, but that is in some ways misleading: the election was much closer than you might think from the balance of colors, and in fact Clinton won slightly more votes than Trump overall. The states are colored red or blue to indicate whether a majority of their voters voted for the Republican candidate, Donald Trump, or the Democratic candidate, Hillary Clinton, respectively. Here is a typicalĬlick on any of the maps for a larger picture Sites use to show the results of presidential elections. Most of us are, by now, familiar with the maps the TV channels and web Maps of the 2016 US presidential election results Many of the things people have been asking about are answered in this list of frequently asked questions. I may not be able to reply to everyone, but I much appreciate all the comments and suggestions. Email: Thanks to everyone who wrote in about the maps. ![]()
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