The winner of the 2024 U.S. Presidential Election is turning into clear, as proven by at present’s newspaper election maps. Donald Trump has secured two key battleground states, North Carolina and Georgia, and leads over Kamala Harris in a number of states already known as in his favor.
In U.S. elections, conventional choropleth maps – the place areas are shaded to symbolize the profitable or main candidate – can typically be deceptive. These maps shade every state or county based mostly on the bulk vote, creating expansive areas of a single shade that distort the geographic distribution of voter help. This strategy tends to magnify the dominance of 1 celebration in states with massive however sparsely populated areas, whereas densely populated city areas, which can vote in another way, occupy smaller areas and are visually minimized.
Consequently, choropleth maps can misrepresent the precise stability of voter help, making it difficult for readers to precisely grasp election outcomes. Different visualizations, resembling cartograms and dot-density maps, provide a extra correct reflection of the citizens by resizing areas or representing particular person votes, offering a clearer and extra informative view of the political panorama.
For example the New York Instances has used a proportional image margin map for instance the power of help for every candidate throughout counties. On this map, coloured circles are “proportional to the quantity every county’s main candidate is forward,” successfully visualizing the dimensions and distribution of margins.
Moreover, the Instances features a conventional choropleth map (with states coloured by the main candidate) and a “swing map,” which visualizes the shift within the margin of votes solid for Democrats and Republicans in every county. On this swing map, if extra voters have chosen the Democratic candidate in comparison with 2020 (in proportion phrases), the arrow is coloured blue – even when Trump is presently main within the complete proportion of votes (and vice versa for a Republican shift).
The “Shift from 2020” map maybe supplies the clearest image but of the 2024 election dynamics. As seen within the supplied screenshot, there was a big swing towards Trump in numerous counties which have already been known as.
The Washington Put up’s Presidential Outcomes 2024 affords a cartogram view as a substitute for its conventional choropleth map. On this cartogram, every state is represented by plenty of squares, equivalent to its electoral votes. The squares are coloured by the main candidate, and hovering over a state reveals the vote rely for every candidate and an estimate of the votes counted.
