MAPPING OUR DIVISIONS

MAPPING OUR DIVISIONS

I recently read an article by Philip Kennicott on WashingtonPost.com that tried to examine the map we saw after Election Day two weeks ago. You know the map: It's blue on one side, blue on the other side, has a dab of blue at the top, and is red, red, red in the middle.

I remember thinking how misleading that map is, giving the impression by glance that a broad swath of the nation is Republican, when in fact, to be a red state, all that's needed is to get one more Republican vote than Democrat, and, out east, where the country's population is densest, an 80-20 pro-Democratic vote would show up as a little blue dot (e.g., the District of Columbia).

Thanks to this article (accompanied by its own unique map), I was able to find these maps produced by Michael Gastner, Cosma Shalizi, and Mark Newman at the University of Michigan (though I gather their work is not university-funded or endorsed). They show what the states would look like if they were sized according to their electoral votes. They also do one better service: One of the maps they show displays shades of purple, to better reassure those of us in the 48% of the country whose candidate didn't win that the nation isn't quite the political divide that we fear it is.

Washington Post map only here.

University of Michigan maps only here.

USA Today map of counties only here.

Princeton map only here.

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