On Fri, 12 Nov 2004, snit snat wrote:
> Here's the most popular collection of maps, some of which alter the shape of
> the country to account for population density:
> http://www-personal.umich.edu/~mejn/election/
Right. The problem is that these transforms alter the shape of the map so much that it loses its meaning as a map, IMHO. And the weighted county by county map is worst of all -- it looks like a maddened animal restrained by lilliputian filiments. Which I guess has a certain sense to it :o) but not the one I'm looking for.
By striking, I mean a map that clearly shows electoral reality, and that clearly shows how the other map is wrong. For that you need something that looks like the US. It's certainly possible to make the states keep their visual and conceptual relation while changing their size. (Doug has several maps like that in his State of the USA Atlas.) But maps like that don't capture the reality of blue cities surrounded by red countryside irrespective of state.
I want a map that somehow
1) replaces the blue state/red state idea with the blue city/red plain
idea
2) makes it immediately visually clear that the population of both sectors
is equal; and yet
3) preserves the visual relation to the geographical map.
Talking this over with Jordan, it began to strike me that maybe the way to do this would be with a 3-D map, with population density represented by height.
Offhand the simplest way to do this might be a 3-D histogram, where each county had a height corresponding to its population divided by its area (so that a large county would be flatter than a small county with the same pop) and each was colored appropriately.
Pictorially that might look very much like the underlying reality of tall blue cities surrounded by thinly populated red plains and deserts.
In a fancier mode, perhaps the counties could be aggregated into people figures of appropriate sizes, with towering blue people surrounded by angry red lilliputian armies.
Is there publically available data that would allow us to do this?
Also can anyone think of a program that might be able to generate such a map given the proper data?
Michael