Saturday, August 05, 2017

City on a hill

What's this city? Why, it's the United States of America, in a "3-D" representation of our recent presidential election. Pretty cool, huh! I've been exercised over the way two-dimensional maps misrepresent electoral results (including the simplification of red/blue) for years, and this effort does a pretty good job of addressing the problems. By coding color to the margin of victory it adds some subtlety, but I still prefer maps which try to represent all voters, with a scale of purples. But that might be nostalgia nowadays, as the paucity of pinks and light blues here shows. In the absence of proportional representation (but the presence of gerrymandering), we can only expect less purple.