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2016 US Presidential Election Maps By Population Vs Land Area

October 24, 2019 23 Comments

2016 US Presidential Election Map By Population Vs Land Area

Map created by Larry Weru at StemLounge

The map above is one of several attempts to improve on the somewhat famous 2016 US Presidential Election Map which you can see below.

2016 US Presidential Election Map By County and Vote Share

The map above is an early attempt to solve the issue by showing vote share by county instead of just showing winner takes all.

Based on that it seems fair that Trump won the 2016 election. Trump won approximately 2,600 counties compared to Clinton only winning around 500. However those 500 counties had a lot more people, which is why she received over 2.8 million more votes than Trump.

Therefore the map at the top of the page and the maps below try to visualise this discrepancy.

The Muddy Waters map leverages Color Theory to express vote margins and vote populations in a 2-dimensional scale. In particular:

Horizontal scale represents vote margins. Vertical scale represents vote totals.

Lightness (Vertical Scale)

The lighter counties had fewer votes. The darker counties had more votes.

Hue + Saturation (Horizontal Scale)

The closer a county gets to gray, the closer the votes were 50:50. So a highly saturated red county was won by Trump with high percent vote margins. A highly saturated blue county was won by Hillary with high percent vote margins.

You can read the full post here, which is really interesting.

The two other maps below also try to tackle this issue:

Try to impeach this

Map created by reddit user BoMcCready

Each circle is centred over a county. The colour is who won (blue = Clinton / Red = Trump) and the size is the absolute margin of victory. You can see an interactive version here.

Finally, as Jack Miller put it: “Land doesn’t vote. People do.”

Land doesn't vote. People do.

Map created by Karim Douïeb

Find these maps interesting? Please leave your comments below and share on social media:
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Filed Under: United States

Comments

  1. Harmon says

    October 24, 2019 at 4:41 pm

    Jack Miller is wrong. One purpose of the Constitution was to keep democracy from turning into mobocracy, and a federal republic translating people votes into land votes was the mechanism chosen for that. On the whole, this has worked, despite slaveholder rebellion & progressive tinkering. If we survive the current madness, it will be because land has a vote.

    Reply
    • Karen says

      November 6, 2019 at 6:36 pm

      Very well said!!!

      Reply
      • Elyena Rollins says

        August 15, 2020 at 2:34 pm

        I agree! Thank you for putting it so clearly.

        Reply
    • Andre says

      December 18, 2019 at 12:58 am

      Agreed. Just did an interesting thing. Grabbed the county vs party map (red or blue) and then over-laid onto that the mean income map (from light green – low income, to dark green, high income). By using the layer mode you can mix the two together. Very interesting results – and I think you can guess what I saw.

      Reply
    • Ep21 says

      December 20, 2019 at 5:42 am

      Well said, Harmon.

      Reply
    • Jim B. says

      April 26, 2020 at 9:44 pm

      My understanding is that our voting system was made like this simply to ensure that the cities don’t always get to elect the president and the rural areas get a say. It seems to be working.
      Speaking of progressive tinkering, we should be fair and remind people that is was conservative tinkering that started the gerrymandering mess. It’s one of the main reasons we now have candidates and presidents that half the country hates. It will not end anytime soon if we don’t fix redistricting.

      Reply
      • Eric says

        September 3, 2021 at 12:55 pm

        “ Speaking of progressive tinkering, we should be fair and remind people that is was conservative tinkering that started the gerrymandering mess.”

        Proof?

        Reply
    • Charlie Pym says

      July 1, 2020 at 4:00 am

      So in a democracy, land has a vote? I’m not sure why that would be the case. For that matter, I’m not sure how a democracy turns into a mobocracy, except that the majority is one you disagree with.

      It’s strange that in reading these comments (as of 6/30/2020, admittedly late to the party) no one has brought up the purpose of the electoral college. It wasn’t to protect farmers in the Midwest, which didn’t yet exist as a region of the U.S. It wasn’t to protect the rural citizens from the city-dwellers, whom they outnumbered at the time the Constitution was drafted. It was to protect slavery. The electoral college was devised to reassure slave-owners that they could continue to own human beings, at least until the year 1808. That’s because there was a strong sentiment in the states whose economies didn’t depend upon slavery to abolish the institution, which was wildly at odds with the stated principles of both the Revolution and the Constitutional Convention. And since the total voting population of those Northern states was far greater than the total voting population of the states that relied on slavery, the Southern states were afraid that slavery would soon become illegal throughout the nation they were about to join.

      Since the main objective for the free states at the time was the formation of a United States, they made a number of compromises. One of them was article one section nine of the Constitution, which provided that Congress would make no law prohibiting slavery until 1808. (The Act Prohibiting Importation of Slaves became law of the land on January 1, 1808, the earliest possible moment; the slave states had been right to fear abolitionist sentiment in the North.) Another was the three-fifths compromise, which let states count their non-voting, non-citizen human property as 60% of a person so that white voters in the slave states would have outsized representation in the House of Representatives. And easily the most lasting compromise was the electoral college, which guaranteed slave states that, for as long as it lasted, a simple majority of American voters would not be able to elect a President who didn’t have their best interest — owning humans who would work their fields generation after generation — at heart.

      And that is why, in 2020, the vote for President of someone in Wyoming is worth 3.75 the vote of a Californian. The electoral college is a vestige of a brutal and inhuman institution, and it’s one that continues to deprive Americans of a representational democracy even today.

      The past isn’t dead, as Faulkner wrote. It’s not even past.

      Reply
      • Jolie says

        November 5, 2020 at 11:16 pm

        Great history lesson. And let’s remember: voting was a privilege reserved not just for men, or white men, but white men who owned property. (Of any kind.). And yet these wealthy land-and-chattel (including human chattel owners) still felt it necessary to protect their power with the non-democratic Electoral College. And they still do!

        Reply
      • Mark Norman says

        April 26, 2021 at 3:45 pm

        On the 3/5ths compromise, the North did not want slaves counted as whole because to do so would dilute their representation. It is always, in present times, being presented as somehow an example of how the slave was seen as less than human. Not so. It only had to do with proportional representation that would swing toward the South. A prospect the North couldn’t live with.

        Reply
      • Geo says

        September 3, 2021 at 12:58 pm

        That is a leftist fairytale on why the electoral college was formed. It was formed to stop cities where corruption is rampant from dominating the election.
        We are a republic!

        Reply
        • BigJim says

          October 6, 2021 at 3:39 pm

          The cities barely existed at the time of the founding of the country, and the corruption was found largely in the rural areas, which were away from any scrutiny by outsiders.

          The only fairy tale here is the one Geo is putting forward as fact instead of the rightful fiction that it is.

          Reply
    • Lynn Miller says

      October 29, 2020 at 10:37 pm

      The leftist mind has no problem with mob rule. Always end for leftist in tyranny.

      Reply
      • Geo says

        September 3, 2021 at 1:00 pm

        Exactly! What a country we are becoming. Leftist mob rule with tactics straight from 30’ s Germany.

        Reply
  2. John D. says

    November 5, 2019 at 8:36 pm

    Typo: 1st sentence of the 1st paragraph
    following the BoMcCready Map.
    Each circle is centered over a country.
    S/B county!

    Reply
    • Brilliant Maps says

      January 13, 2020 at 11:37 am

      Thanks now fixed!

      Reply
  3. James Collier says

    November 26, 2019 at 5:46 pm

    Only a map that shows Trump won, and by a lot (electoral college) is accurate.

    Reply
  4. Derek Graham says

    December 20, 2019 at 9:39 pm

    Maps can be used to distort almost anything. A simple example was using a projection of a map of the world which distorted the size of the British Empire (mainly Canada) thus providing a propaganda tool.

    Reply
    • Jerry Heneghan says

      March 12, 2020 at 12:17 am

      It’s a PROJECTION, duh.

      Reply
  5. riley k says

    August 26, 2020 at 4:14 pm

    what it do flight crew. FTC. Flight team stand up! ay man….

    Reply
  6. Karen says

    September 3, 2020 at 8:39 am

    Not a democracy.

    States joined Republic with the understanding they would have a (small) say on Presidents. That isn’t democracy.

    Reply
  7. Democrates says

    December 5, 2020 at 1:22 am

    What’s the opposite of mobocracy, the literal meaning of democracy, again? It’s aristocracy, innit?

    Reply
  8. John Emerson says

    August 2, 2022 at 12:08 am

    LOT of BS up there. It’s a big, stupid jump from majority rule to “mobocracy”. What we end up with is a lot of various small privileged groups who have far more than their share of power, with no reason for it. A citizen of Wyoming is overrepresented in the Senate, compared to a citizen California, by a factor of 67. Is there any reason for that? Are Wyomingites amazingly wonderfully people, or is it just random and unfair? I haven’t seen their wonderfulness. Rural people think thaty’re so much better than urban people, but they aren’t. (I live in a city now but grew up in a farm town).

    Besides the fact that the overrepresented small states are about 2-1 Republican, which many might think is a good thing, small states easily become centers for corrupt interests, since small-state elections are much cheaper to buy. This applies to both red and blue states — blue Delaware is notable as a stronghold of corrupt finance. All this BS is just attempts to justify unjustifiable privilege by people who have it.

    The reason for our crappy Senate is that the small colonies didn’t want the US to be dominated by NY, VA, PA, and the other large colonies. It was just a bribe to get them to sign on. No sense ot it any more, it just does harm.

    Reply

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