- What is this? This is a map showing US presidential election results by state.
- What's interesting about it? It's kinda neat by itself, but the best part is if you change the mode to Relative to popular vote. Then you can see which states have become more Democratic/Republican relative to the national popular vote over time!
- What are some interesting states to click on? Here are some good ones:
- Missouri is a state that used to be a true battleground state - as recently as 1992 it was more Democratic than average. But ever since then it's made an accelerating trend to be more and more Republican.
- Georgia has been pretty consistently more Republican than average...except in 1976 and 1980 when Jimmy Carter was running. In fact, if you look at it versus the popular vote, the swing from 1972 (R+27) to 1976 (D+32) is 59%, which is the largest I've seen!
- New Hampshire used to be pretty Republican, but ever since 1996 it's been very close to even.
- How does this account for third party candidates? The margin shown is a percentage of the total vote from that state, including third party candidates. (notice Utah's much lower Republican margin in 2016)
- Why does this only go back to 1972? Honestly, because a third party (the American Independent Party) won a few states in 1968 and I wasn't sure how best to handle that.
- When is the cartogram data from? I'm using
fivethirtyeight.svg from this Electoral cartograms page. The data shows the electoral votes for each state from after the 2010 Census - perhaps in the future I could make the map reflect the electoral votes from Censuses in the past. - How did you make this? Thanks for asking! It's written in React and TypeScript, and the map is available on GitHub.
- Where did the data come from? Mostly from Dave Leip's Atlas of US Presidential Elections.
See my writeups of the project:
Colors by ColorBrewer 2.0
