Our friend Ninja Bob sensed something was wrong with all of the Blue State-Red State maps we've been seeing in the news:
"The way it was colored, it gives the impression that everyone in any particular county voted the same way. It's a pretty clever bit of manipulation. Taking a rigidly defined set of criteria, it makes the map technically correct, but presented in a way to make it look like it represents something else. It was basically applying the all or nothing rule to the voting results for each county...kind of like the way the Electoral College works. So that's when I got "The Idea". I was going to make my own map, one that more accurately reflected voting America."It is indeed my great pleasure to present to you, my loyal readers, The Ninja-Map:
22 comments:
That map doesn't look right. The ratios look to be too small, for example 90% in Oklahoma.
In addition to Brian Doherty's excellent comment (showing how the proportions are needlessly skewed by area), the decision was made on this map to enclose the smaller vote percentage within the greater. This results in an illusion of contiguity where there are a lot of blue or red states, thus visually isolating the lesser percentages more than may really be the case.
Brian's a little off -- Ohio and Florida look clearly 50%-50%ish to me. The amount of red is about equal to the amount of blue in each. (Remember, there's no red "underneath" the blue.)
Who cares? Bush won. Get over it, and work on '08.
It wouldn't be hard to make a real map like that, but that's not even close to accurate. A program like ImageJ will allow you to analyze images to find areas of selections. I'm sure there's some image analysis program that will let you scale selections by area, too. Either way this is way wrong even if it is an interesting idea. I think the height-mapped weighting image from a few days ago was much more useful than this.
california looks way off...
Good idea, but back to the drawing board, for the reasons Brian gave. Version 2 will be great, I'm sure.
Yeah, they ALL look off to me. My palms are getting hairy too. Victory in '08!!!
Oops :) Never mind. I was the one off.
Here's Ohio broken up:
http://defeatjohnjohn.com/images/ohio.jpg
There's clearly twice as much red than blue.
This is The Best Map Yet
http://www.wonkette.com/archives/a-country-of-mapmakers-ii-025272.php
These maps are far better:
http://www-personal.umich.edu/~mejn/election/
The sizes of counties have been adjusted according to the size of their population - and the normal red/blue divide is expressed as a shade of purple, depending on the percentage of the population which voted one way or another. The cities bulge, and the heartland shrinks...
This would be alot easier to express if you were allowed to include html in posts on your site...
What about the all important question of what percentage of the vote did the Constitution Party candidate get?
http://glaivester.blogspot.com/2004/11/constitution-party-and-vote.html
I can't speak authoritatively about the rest of the USA, but northern NJ, where I live, should be solid red, not blue as shown. Sussex, Bergen, Warren, Hunterdon counties went 60-65% Bush. Makes me very skeptical of this map!!
The best map is the map that shows which states voted red and which voted blue. Period.
Liberals are ashamed of that map because it shows they only have the gay, the dumb urban ("Woody Allen's a genius!"), and the urban plantation slave vote.
gosh, I wonder what ct's politics are. Imagine if you were right: only 51% of Americans are heterosexual, clever and white.
oh, and they ALL voted for Bush...
A better map can also be found in the NY Times of 11/4/04 which shows red-blue county by county across the national map. It appears that there are majority blue counties in every state except Alaska, Oklahoma and Utah, and majority red counties in every state except Massachusetts and Delaware. So there are pockets of sanity most everywhere.
I'm still waiting to see the percentages of blues and reds in each state mixed into the corresponding shades of purple. Perhaps the ratios can be proportionatly expanded a bit to assure a more varied and visually striking pallette of purples. It's another example of how we love to see the world in simple black and white generalizations. Generalizations that are not true.
The real picture is much more complex as well as much more homogenious than we seem to want to believe.
By the way this map has not accuratly rendered the percentages at all! The wonkette map suggested above is much better.
Naw, that map's not right. Know this because I'm from Northern NY. The mapmaker has made the edges of the state blue, when that is not the case. Jefferson and Lewis counties were red.
Hi, Ninja Bob here. I'd just like to take a moment and say, "Relax, pull back a step or two, and consider this..." I am not a cartographer. I got a regular day job, just like most of you, and squeezed the making of this map in amongst the various other things I have to do. It was meant more as a reassurance to my friends that the whole country hasn't gone to the GOPs...that and the fact that the vote by county map bugged me. You guys are delving WAY too far into this. I'm extremely grateful to my friend Krup for posting it, it was a very big compliment. I also agree with one of the other postings about the University of Michigan maps, they're very good and actually more accurately represent what I was trying to express. Thanks for the interest, but it's time to move along, nothing to see here.
I'm guessing that the proportions are correct. It appears as though the individual states' images were correct and scaled to the appropriate size, colored witht the standard "paintbucket" tool, and then pasted inside of the larger, winner-colored state.
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