Thursday, November 09, 2017

Beyond Cartogram Elections


Yesterday we looked at some of the visualization methods used by the New York Times to map the election results in the Virginia governor's race. These methods included using scaled markers, directional arrows and color intensity. The Washington Post has also been experimenting with new visualization techniques for mapping the Virginia election results.

In How Virginia went from blue to red and back again the Post uses scaled pyramids to show the number of votes cast in each electoral precinct and the margin of victory. These pyramids are colored to show the winner in each district. The height of the pyramid represents the size of the winning margin, while the width of the pyramid represents the size of the vote.

These scaled pyramid markers work quite well visually. They accurately portray how the Republicans continued to do well in the less densely populated rural areas while the Democrats dominated the race by winning in urban areas where more voters live.

If you want to know more about how the New York Times created their different views of the Virginia election results then you should read Mapbox's report New York Times live-mapping Virginia election. This blog post explains how the Times used Mapbox GL JS expressions in order to create their different views of the election data.

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