Nov 7

Purple map, 2012 edition

After the last election, I created a thing called the purple map, which was designed to show that although a given state in the US elections might be “called” for Democrat or Republican, in practice each state actually ends up pretty close to 50/50 in votes. The purple map, instead of colouring a map blue or red, colours it purple, showing the proportion of Republican vs Democrat votes. And, as you’ll see, no state is blue, and no state is red: every state’s purple.

Anyway, here’s the map, which is being updated in real time for the US 2012 elections as I write this was updated in realtime throughout the night but is now static:

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You can grab a higher-resolution SVG version of the map if you choose, too. Thank you to Wikipaedia, as before, and to NPR for their live data feed.

13 thoughts on “Purple map, 2012 edition

  1. spacer Tom Sheppard says:

    Actually, you map seems to show several red and two blue states. Although the majority are pink or purple. For instance, Idaho, Wyoming, Utah and Oklahoma appear red while Vermont and Hawaii (and maybe Rhode Island) seem clearly blue.

  2. spacer sil says:

    Tom Sheppard: nah, they’re redder or bluer, indicating higher Republican or higher Democrat victories, but they’re not pure red or pure blue; I’ve just checked. spacer

  3. Pingback: US Election: Purple Map | My Daily Feeds

  4. spacer Anonymous says:

    It would be interesting to see this at a lower level of granularity. For example:
    usatoday30.usatoday.com/news/politicselections/vote2004/countymap.htm

  5. spacer Anon says:

    I missed it. Any chance you’d put up a gif or some other sequence? Looks cool.

  6. spacer sil says:

    A GIF sequence would have been cool, if I’d thought to record the incoming data in realtime, but I didn’t, I’m afraid!

  7. spacer D. Pr. says:

    Wikipedia suggests that “Democratic” is the correct nomenclature for the Democratic Party. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Democrat_Party_%28epithet%29

  8. spacer Tim says:

    You’ve forgotten to color the non-contiguous portion of Virginia on the Delmarva peninsula.

  9. spacer D says:

    You seem to be showing DC a redish color, although it should be the bluest “state” on the map (91% voted democratic).

  10. spacer Anonymous says:

    Your key shouldn’t be three distinct items (red/blue/50-50), it should be a gradient bar with red on one side, blue on the other, and 50-50 in the center, so that you can at a glance see approximately where along the scale a state falls.

  11. spacer Spencer says:

    Suggestion: instead of 3 distinct items being shown in your key, why not use a gradient bar, with red on one end and blue on the other, so that one can approximately gauge where a state falls at a glance. As everything blends together, it won’t be perfect, but it seems more useful than the three blocks you have now, since no state is completely red or blue.

  12. spacer Cyranix says:

    I was just describing this effect to some Canadian coworkers last night. Although the overall effect is pretty good for demonstrating the difference between popular vote and electoral outcome, the presentation could still use some tweaks. If you’ll permit me to offer some constructive criticism:

    * There’s no at-a-glance indication of how far from 50/50 a particular state is. Correlating a hue shift to a numerical quantity is not easy, especially because the reference values of 0/50/100 are kept separate.
    * Tying into the above point, be mindful of the effect of adjacency on color perception.
    * Magenta isn’t super easy on the eyes for extended viewing, at least for me personally. That may be a reason why other people show the difference from 50% as an increasingly darker shade of the party color. Perhaps you could experiment with adjusting brightness or saturation while maintaining the “purple” theme?
    * This map looks very red-purple because many Republican-leaning states cover more physical area. It might provide clearer (or even improved) insights if you break away from the geographic view. Maybe a treemap with rectangles proportional to electoral votes? Just thinking aloud there…
    * If you implement this with a JavaScript graphics library, you could get nice additions like an on-hover display to show electoral votes for a state or popular vote statistics. I’ve used Raphael to do it pretty easily (I used the exact same SVG map as a starting point!) but there are plenty of options; Bonsai was one library that I found out about recently which looked quite spiffy.

  13. spacer n3m0 says:

    Still – it shows how media simplify and in the outcome – cheat – about the ‘red/blue’ states. Even though helluva people would liek the world to be monochrome, it is actually RGB…

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