The map above is one of several attempts to improve on the somewhat famous 2016 US Presidential Election Map which you can see below.
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:
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.”
Find these maps interesting? Please leave your comments below and share on social media:
Harmon says
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.
Karen says
Very well said!!!
Andre says
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.
Ep21 says
Well said, Harmon.
Jim B. says
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.
Charlie Pym says
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.
John D. says
Typo: 1st sentence of the 1st paragraph
following the BoMcCready Map.
Each circle is centered over a country.
S/B county!
Brilliant Maps says
Thanks now fixed!
James Collier says
Only a map that shows Trump won, and by a lot (electoral college) is accurate.
Derek Graham says
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.
Jerry Heneghan says
It’s a PROJECTION, duh.