Thursday, April 12, 2018

Not THAT Election Map


After his election President Donald Trump was quick to hang a 2016 election map up in the West Wing. This electoral college map is mostly colored red with a few splashes of blue reflecting how the country's electoral districts voted.  While looking at this map Trump can temporarily forget he lost the popular vote and pretend that he is universally loved across the United States.

However not all election maps tell the same story. The Presidential election 2016: dasymetric dot density map is a dot map of the 2016 U.S. Presidential election. On the map one dot equals one vote. So one red dot equals one vote for the Republican candidate and one blue vote equals one vote for the Democratic candidate.

This dot map provides a much better visualization of the overall number of votes for each candidate, compared to the electoral college map. It allows us to see where Trump (or Clinton) actually did dominate the vote and where voting was much more even.

The map was created by Kenneth Field and you can read more about how the map was made on his Cartonerd blog.

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