There’s more than one way to depict data on a map. At the last Esri user conference, Sarah Bell, Kenneth Field and John Nelson demonstrated different ways to map the results of the last U.K. parliamentary election, and how they changed from the previous election. The video of their presentation is attendee-only, but Ken and John have posted about how they each went about their tasks: here’s Ken’s post and here’s John’s; plus, as is his wont, John has posted a video.
The Map Men look at gerrymandering on U.S. electoral district maps. A reasonably comprehensive primer on the subject even if comes from a couple of Brits baffled by the subject. And they finish with a surprisingly sharp point: gerrymanderers wouldn’t know how to draw maps like these if voting intentions weren’t predictable.
Yesterday, U.S. Vice President and Democratic presidential nominee Kamala Harris announced Minnesota Governor Tim Walz as her running mate. Among other things, Walz is a former social studies teacher and early adopter of GIS as a teaching tool, and has nerded out on geography and GIS throughout his political career, both in the U.S. House of Representatives and as governor. Walz even spoke at the 2024 Esri User Conference in San Diego last month (as someone married to a high school teacher, I can say this: he totally talks like a high school teacher). See also this summary of the talk, and Walz’s map nerdery in general, in the Minnesota Reformer.
The U.S. congressional electoral map was redrawn after the 2020 census, but now parts are being redrawn again. ABC News has a page tracking developments in what they call midcycle redistricting. “More than a half-dozen states face the prospect of having to go through the redistricting process again, mostly due to federal and/or state litigation over racial or partisan gerrymandering concerns. Both Democrats and Republicans have the opportunity to flip seats in districts drawn more favorably than they were last cycle. For example, Democrats appear poised to pick up at least one seat in Alabama and could theoretically get more favorable maps in Louisiana and Georgia. Republicans, meanwhile, could benefit from more favorable 2024 maps in North Carolina and New Mexico.”
Hoo boy. Globes are everywhere and proof of round-earther brainwashing: that seems to be the point of view of Kandiss Taylor, a former Republican candidate for Georgia governor and recently elected GOP district chair who apparently went full flat-earther in a recent podcast episode. See coverage from Gizmodo, Rolling Stone and Salon.
There has been an outbreak of anti-trans legislation at the state level in the United States, and Erin Reed has spent the last three years tracking it. Her anti-trans legislative risk map measures the extent to which trans people are endangered by such legislation, whether it’s already on the books or could be the offing before the next election. The map reveals, no surprise, a polarized America: one where some states are racing to put anti-trans laws on the books while others enact protections and set themselves up as safe harbours.
Previously: Mapping Safe Washrooms.
A shoutout to Keir Clarke at Maps Mania, whose coverage of election maps is such that whenever I think, “hey, that country just had an election, I ought to write a post collecting some maps of the results,” I usually find that Keir has already beaten me to the punch.
Leading up to last Saturday’s federal election in Australia, ABC News Australia had a page explaining the usual problem with geographic electoral maps when sparsely populated rural districts are enormous and lots of voters are concentrated in the cities. Calling the page “The Australian electoral map has been lying to you” might have been torquing things a bit, though. Then again, via Maps Mania, live election results maps from The Australian and The Guardian both use straight geographic maps, so maybe not.
Julien Gaffuri’s map of the second-round results of the French presidential election is, as you can see, extraordinarily busy—and, by the way, extremely processor-intensive: it will slow down your machine—because it’s at the commune level and each circle is scaled to population. (News flash: Paris has lots of people in it.) And those circles are striped circles: the proportion of the votes is indicated by the area taken up by a given colour. The map of the first round results shows more stripes (because more candidates) but is by department, so it’s a little easier both to read and to see how the striped circle format works. It’s an interesting alternative to a choropleth map, and a bit less ambiguous.
France 24’s interactive map (right) covers both first and second rounds and shows results by region, department and commune. It is annoyingly unlabelled, which is a surprising choice for France’s English-language news service. Le Monde’s map uses a similar colour scheme—yellow/orange for Macron, grey/brown for Le Pen—but at least has mouseover labels.
Le Parisien’s maps aren’t interactive, nor are they particularly large, but they illustrate other aspects of the results, like the abstentions, voter turnout and differences vs. the 2017 vote. The Guardian’s maps are low on detail but provide similar information. Libération’s map, on the other hand, is a cluttered mess, showing each commune as a proportionally sized dot. [Maps Mania]
Previously: 2022 French Presidential Election (First Round).
Some maps showing the results of the first round of France’s 2022 presidential election. Le Monde’s interactive map shows the winner by commune: it has all the caveats you’d expect from a geographical map (the cities have a lot of voters but not much territory, making Le Pen’s rural support look more impressive). Bloomberg’s maps are behind a paywall: see this Twitter thread instead, which has maps of the regional concentrations of each candidate’s support. (With a dozen candidates on the ballot, it’s hard to get a true picture from a single map.) Also on Twitter, Dominic Royé’s dasymetric maps of the results [Maps Mania].
Previously: Mapping the 2017 French Presidential Election (First Round).
The Washington Post looks at how redistricting has changed the U.S. congressional electoral map so far. “As of Dec. 15, half of the 50 states have settled on the boundaries for 165 of 435 U.S. House districts. […] The Washington Post is using the number of Trump and Biden voters within old and new district boundaries, according to data collected by Decision Desk HQ, to show how the districts have changed politically. As more states finalize their maps, we’ll add them to this page to give a fuller picture of what to expect in the midterms.”
Previously: A Redistricting Roundup; The Washington Post Examines Proposed Congressional District Maps.
The New York Times and Texas Monthly look at the bizarre shapes in the new congressional electoral map of Texas, which gains two new representatives. Texas Monthly’s Dan Solomon: “Across the state, there will be one more majority-Anglo district than under the prior map, and one fewer majority-Hispanic one. The two new seats Texas was awarded for its booming population will be placed in Austin and Houston—and even though non-Anglo newcomers made up 95 percent of the state’s population growth the last decade, both districts will be Anglo-majority.” Kenneth Field has some thoughts. [Maps Mania]
A Surge of Citizen Activism Amps Up the Fight Against Gerrymandering (Bloomberg): “From North Carolina to Michigan to California, voting rights groups, good government advocates, data crunchers and concerned voices are finding new ways into the fight for fair representation, via informational meetings, mapping contests, testimony workshops and new technologies.”
Can Math Make Redistricting More Fair? (CU Boulder Today): “Clelland doesn’t advocate for any political party or for any particular redistricting proposal. Instead, she and her colleagues use mathematical models to build a series of redistricting statistics. These numbers give redistricting officials a baseline that they can compare their own maps to, potentially identifying cases of gerrymandering before they’re inked into law.”
Previously: The Washington Post Examines Proposed Congressional District Maps.
Redistricting—and gerrymandering—is one of the blacker cartographic arts. With the release of data from the 2020 U.S. Census, and the changes in state congressional delegations—some states gain a seat or two, some states lose a seat, others are unchanged—new congressional maps are being drawn up for the 2022 elections. The Washington Post takes a look at proposed congressional district maps in Colorado, Indiana and Oregon, and what their impact may be.
The New York Times maps partisan sorting in America—the tendency for voters to self-select into areas where people think and vote the same way they do—down to the neighbourhood level.
The maps above—and throughout this article—show their estimates of partisanship down to the individual voter, colored by the researchers’ best guess based on public data like demographic information, voter registration and whether voters participated in party primaries.
We can’t know how any individual actually voted. But these maps show how Democrats and Republicans can live in very different places, even within the same city, in ways that go beyond the urban-suburban-rural patterns visible in aggregated election results.
It goes beyond racial, urban vs. suburban vs. rural and house vs. apartment splits, to the point where researchers are wondering whether Americans are “paying attention to the politics of their neighbors” when they decide where to live. This has implications not only in terms of electoral targeting (e.g. gerrymandering, voter suppression), but in terms of basic social cohesion.
The maps are based on research by Jacob R. Brown and Ryan D. Enos published earlier this month in Nature Human Behavior.
Previously: Red and Blue vs. Gray and Green.
