Of course, we've all seen this map outlining Obama's victory over McCain. Really, though, from that map, a quick glance would lead us to believe that it was almost 50/50. Due to the electoral college and how that is set up, a different picture is painted...
This is a map of the United States that has been warped to display national population density by state, essentially reflecting how the electoral votes are distributed. Really, it is unfair to give Wyoming the same amount of electoral votes as Connecticut when, on this map, CT is about 3X larger than the state with the larger land area, WY. Note that the blue (Democrat) states that went for Obama are massively huge while the red states, with the exception of Texas, Georgia, and some other states in the Bible belt, are quite a bit smaller. This is how McCain won so many states but ended with so few electoral votes.
This map shows each state by electoral votes. Notice the similarity to the above map of national population density.Though it is difficult to note the difference, open two instances of Firefox, one on each map, and click back and forth rapidly to see the disparity.
This map is my favorite of them all. It shows the voting map broken down by county. I have enlarged it so that you can pick out your own county, unless you are surrounded by similar-voting counties. Note how Ohio and Indiana are primarily red. Pennsylvania and Virginia, two other swing states that McCain had to win (but didn't) are almost entirely red except for their major metro areas, Philadelphia and Washington DC. This is because in these four states, the minority counties that swung Democrat carried a huge proportion of the population.
Though this map is of no use to the casual observer, let me explain. It shows the national electoral map distributed by country, then warped according to each county's population. Note that the east and west coasts, along with a belt extending from Pennsylvania to Illinois, the Senator's home state, are almost entirely blue.
This map is by far the most telling. Again, it shows counties, but this time they are colored on a scale from red to blue based on the actual vote, not electoral vote or who won in the end. Note that large swaths of the poorly populated areas in the midwest are the most purely red. This carries little significance, though, when you factor in how few people these actually are. The majority of areas that Obama won, on the contrary, are bluish-purple. There are very few mostly blue areas. Note the bottom edge of Texas, which McCain won, is almost perfect blue. This is undoubtedly due to the large Hispanic immigrant populations along the border.
Sante Fe, NM, is by far the brightest area of blue on the map. Again, this could be marked up to a large immigrant population. I can't place the shining blue county in what looks to be right on the southern border of South Dakota. It's placed rather oddly. Further, note the corridor of blue along the lower edge of of the Mississippi River, which Gov. Huckabee referred to as the "Delta" on Fox this morning. There is also a rightward streak extending from this delta to Atlanta. Even Illinois and the markedly liberal New England is purple with some red inroads.
This map better than any other shows us how President-elect Obama captured the high office. This is the scaled map above adjusted to show a population cardogram, like earlier maps. There are nine giant bright blue blobs throughout the map with only small fiery red inroads. The major urban areas successfully captured the electoral votes of those states, and thus, the Presidency for Barack Obama.
-Ze Baron
No comments:
Post a Comment