In a previous post, I talked about how Americans are increasingly living in ‘electoral islands’, clumped together mostly with people who vote the same way they do. I’ve got a way of visualizing this which I’ll get to shortly, but first I’d like to show some different types of electoral maps
Here’s a map from 2016 that you’re probably familiar with.
Blue states were won by Clinton, red by Trump. Because of the winner-take-all nature of the electoral college, states are solid colors no matter how much they are won by. A lot of nuance is lost with that kind of chart.
Here’s another map of the same election that preserves some nuance. The states are red and blue, but shaded based on the size of the victory (the ‘lean’). Red still means Republican, blue means Democrats, but the hue lessens as the size of the victory shrinks. The closer the state is to 50/50, the closer it shows as white.
You can see that the extremely close states, those decided by less than one percent, basically look white (Wisconsin, Michigan, Pennsylvania, New Hampshire). States won by 1-2% have the slightest shades of color (see Florida, slightly pink, and Nevada with a tint of blue). As the size of victory increases, the hue is more intense, all the way up to the solid colors of Wyoming and Washington D.C., which were landslides for the Republicans and Democrats, respectively (D.C. is too small to see on this map).
Let’s look at a similar map, this time at the county level:
What we see: varying ranges of red in the middle of the county (with urban pockets of blue), and mostly blue on the coasts. A scattering of “white” counties.
Now, back to the concept of electoral islands. To visualize this, let’s color the map based solely on the size of the victory in each county, regardless of which party won. As before, white means a 50/50 vote, but the size of the win grows, the shade grows darker. All the way up to black, which is a complete landslide (a win by > 90%). Here is the 2016 map:
As a contrast, here is the map from the 1996 election:
A lot more white and light-gray in the old days, huh?
