The web comic xkcd has done maps before (and I’ve covered most of them) but Friday’s iteration was a departure all the same: an interactive map of the challengers in the 2018 U.S. midterm elections: the larger the candidate’s name, the more significant the office and the better their odds of winning. Remember, these are only the challengers: no incumbents are listed.

Bloomberg maps what political ads are talking about in 210 local television markets, and finds some intriguing patterns in terms of what each party chooses to focus on in each local market. [Nathaniel Rakich]

FiveThirtyEight looks at the polling data for the upcoming 2018 midterm elections and imagines the results for the U.S. House of Representatives if only women, men, nonwhite voters and white voters by education level voted. It’s a thought exercise they’ve indulged in before, with the presidential race in 2016, and it serves to indicate the demographic divide in voting intentions. (Cartographically, the maps suffer from the usual problem of U.S. election maps of congressional districts—large, sparsely populated districts in the middle of the country dominate the map.)

Previously: Trump, Clinton and the Gender Gap; What If Only … Voted?