America really looks like this

I was looking at the amazing 2012 election maps created by Robert J. Vanderbei (Princeton) and Mark Newman (Department of Physics and Center for the Study of Complex Systems, University of Michigan), and although there is a very interesting blended voting map (Most of the country is some shade of purple, a varied blend of Democrat blue and Republican red) what I really wanted was this blended map with a population density overlay.  Because what really stands out is how red the nation seems to be when you do not take the voting population into account; when you do so many of those vast red mid-west blocks fade into pale pink and lavender (very low population).

So I created a new map using Mark’s blended voting map based on the actual numbers of votes for each party overlaid with population maps from Texas Tech University and other sources. 

Here’s the result—what the American political voting distribution really looks like:



Click the image for the full view

Links:
http://www-personal.umich.edu/~mejn/election/2012
http://repositories.tdl.org/ttu-ir/handle/2346/1660
http://www.datapointed.net/2011/04/maps-us-population-change-2000-2010-census


What America Looks Like by Chris Howard is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.

Comments

[Peter , Norman]

This is great, but is the data precinct-level? Seems to be since counties are not uniformly colored.

[Chris Howard]

The precinct level would be interesting to see. Mark Newman's maps and voting numbers are at the county level. I think it's the population density overlays at the county and town/city level giving the variations in each county.