As we approach the first election results of the evening, here are a few maps of the electorate that is doing the voting tonight.

Swing Counties

The Washington Post maps the swing counties that could decide the 2016 U.S. presidential election.

Landslide Counties

The New York Times maps the increasing number of so-called landslide counties—counties where a candidate won by 20 or more percentage points. “The proportion of voters living in landslide counties has steadily increased since 1992, a trend that reflects the growing tendency of like-minded people to live near one another, according to Bill Bishop, a co-author of ‘The Big Sort,’ a 2008 book that identified this phenomenon.”

Bad Hombres, China and Trump Supporters

For all of Donald Trump’s rhetoric about illegal Mexican immigration and competition from China, his supporters don’t seem to be much affected by either. That’s the conclusion of a study by Raul Hinojosa Ojeda of UCLA’s Institute for Research on Labor and Employment. “[A]n examination of the geographical concentration of support for Donald Trump in the presidential primaries indicates a negative correlation between the number of Trump supporters and the population size of Mexican immigrants, as well as a negative correlation between Trump support and import competition from Mexico or China. […] In fact, only 2% of U.S. counties in the U.S. actually fit the Trump narrative of very high Trump support combined with very high levels of immigration or trade.” [CityLab]

The Mysterious Blue Curve

Geographical magazine explores what they call the “mysterious blue curve” —a narrow swath of Democratic support across the centre of the Deep South. I’ll save you a click: it’s where the African-American voters are concentrated. Geographical, though, goes a bit further back—to the fricking late Cretaceous—to explain why the soil in that area was so amenable to growing cotton, an activity that brought so many slaves to the area in the first place.

Felony Convictions and Voting Rights

Cards on the table: I live in a country where prisoners have the right to vote even while in prison, so the American practice—in 48 of 50 states—of not allowing ex-convicts to vote even after release is both alien and upsetting to me. The New York Times maps the impact of that practice, both in terms of how many people in each state can’t vote due to felony convictions, and in terms of how many African-American adults can’t vote—1 in 13!—because of same. When, as the Times says, “[a] black person is more likely to be convicted of a felony than a white person who committed the same crime,” this has the smell of systemic, targeted disenfranchisement to me.