I have come to dislike the widespread use of "blue-red" state maps. Take a look at this interesting set of maps at Professor Robert Vanderbei's website at Princeton University (shown above) and one can appreciate how misleading those two-color maps can be. It uses shades of purple to reflect percentages of voters for each candidate. Professor Vanderbei explains:Using County-by-County election return data from USA Today together with County boundary data from the US Census' Tiger database we produced the following graphic depicting the results. Of course, blue is for the democrats, red is for the republicans, and green is for all other. Each county's color is a mix of these three color components in proportion to the results for that county.Much better!
PS. See this website (Maps and cartograms of the 2004 US presidential election results) for other election maps.
1 comment:
Not entirely specific to this particular post, i find your blog very interesting and enjoy and appreciate your perspective and reasoning.
Yes, Purple America just as all the important and complex Gray areas in matters seemingly black and white.
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