The standard electoral vote map displays islands of blue amid seas of red. Obviously, densely populated areas tended to vote one way, and sparsely populated areas another. So even though the actual presidential vote was fairly close, the maps make it look like a landslide.
We’ve already blogged about one way of visualizing the vote that improves on the standard red-blue dichotomy. But here are two maps that help to equalize population densities:
First, from the New York Times
And second, a "cartogram" from physicist Mark Newman at the University of Michigan, which takes the Robert Vanderbei’s "purple haze" map of the U.S., and stretches it to equalize the population density…
I’m not sure if these maps mean anything, really. But they’re neat to look at. There are still other ways of visualizing the electoral map at The Blogging of the President.
(Thanks to map guru Josh Livni of CommEn Space for the tip.)
