Election Cartogram

You know what this is? No, it's not an acid fever dream, nor is it the album cover of Pink Floyd's new release. It's also not Cobra Commander after being hit by a steam roller. What is though is a cartogram of the USA organized by voting districts. What we saw on November fourth looked something like this:






With the cartogram, made by a guy named Mark Newman, this same data is reorganized so that the states are resized by population, and then are colored red and blue, not just by the color of the state that voted, but by the voting districts within each state. To make it an even more accurate demonstration of how America voted, the voting districts are colored not just red or blue, but shades of purple depending on how many votes the red republicans or blue democrats got.

If you look closely you'll notice that the map has these large splotches of blue outlined by swaths of red. This is because cities that are geographically small but densely populated tended towards democrat while the geographically large but sparsely populated rural areas voted more republican.

The cartograms were made by Mark Newman under a Creative Commons license. Please check out his website for a more comprehensive explanation.