Did you realize traditional electoral maps are very misleading? They look a lot redder than blue, even though Democrat Joe Biden won the White House.
That’s because those maps generally assign one of those colors per state, based on the total vote, according to the New York Post – which makes a lot of sense.
But huge swaths of the country have little population, making it appear that the vast majority of the US votes Republican, when in fact, the nation was nearly evenly divided this year — with Biden sitting at around 74.5 million votes and President Trump at 70.3 million as of Saturday evening.
A different map of the 2020 election shows that when you visualize the vote by population, you get a completely different picture.
Using different colored and sized dots to reflect the vote across the country, Karim Douieb of data science company Jetpack.AI made a map that provides a clearer look at how votes from both parties are dispersed across the country.
Blue dots appear in “solid” red zones from Mississippi to Idaho. Red dots surround big cities and dominate many areas. And a large part of the map is white, reflecting the fact that few people live in those spots.
“I am not the first one and I surely won’t be the last one to point out that traditional electoral maps are a misleading way to represent the outcome of an election,” Douieb tweeted when he created a version of his map using 2016 election data that went viral in February. New York Post
Traditional electoral map:
{ 14 comments… read them below or add one }
That hot zone map may indeed be more accurate, but is not easily interpreted by the average consumer versus the county by county map shown here.
It’s all about getting complicated information across quickly as a visual aid, correct?
Looks just like the country has measles.
Bruh LOL
The real misrepresentation is that your “blotches”, may or MAY NOT be of proper size or proportion, where as a county map that has been evenly shrunk for a visual, appropriately shows the winning COUNTY. Keep in Mind… LA county is NO more important than KERN, Regardless of the population. The exact reason that the electoral college exists… So many whom want to toss the electoral vote want equality…WELL HERE YA GO… with the electoral vote.. Kern is as EQUALLY represented as LA, REGARDLESS of the population. With the diversity of people, economies of scale, and revenue creation, in the US.. the top 20 Cities SHOULD NOT get to set policy for all. Thats called MOB RULES. NOT a Democratic Republic at all. IE the farmer should not be required to forfeit his guns due to high crime rates in the city when he needs to shoot the weasel ( the only criminal for miles), that is killing his chickens. ALSO..why should a farmer with Huge farm revenue and open spaces, get to say NO, you cant put a Transgender bar on main st in La Jolla. Do you really want the city counsel telling the farmer how he can most effectively grow…. ?? He would end up cutting his own throat when there is a food shortage.
Is that why is Trump and his henchmen are so mad and trying to throw out votes? To lower the count since Trump ‘won’ last time only by the Electoral College in those cute little red dot areas (note: I live in one) and not by ‘mob rule’ that you sound worried about. Since Clinton had 3 million more votes and TrumpVirus was declared the winner maybe they can do it again if their unSupreme Court judges pull another 2000 election steal…
If we actually lived in a Democratic Republic, and if the public actually had available excellent educations based on equal distribution of funding to every school so they would be able to distinguish between propaganda/so-called ‘alternative facts’ (isn’t that a hilarious term?) and FACTS; and if our government wasn’t operated by the wealthy for the wealthy who make pretty much all the decision (https://www.commondreams.org/views/2020/11/08/2020-election-triumph-democracy-hold-hosannas), then maybe your fear of mob rule would be worthwhile.
But it isn’t what we’ve got. And this may be a huge voter turnout but there is still a gigantic eligible portion of the population that just doesn’t vote for various reasons. That is disturbing. In my decidedly red mountain area only 41% of eligible voters turned out this election.
But hey, here’s some popular mob rule voting that worked:
https://www.commondreams.org/views/2020/11/10/triumphant-return-power-bolivias-social-movements
Hooray for Bolivia! They fought for their Democracy!
sealintheSelkirks
We do not live in a “Democratic Republic”. We live in a Constitutional Federal Republic.
If you want to change the world, know what the world is.
And not only that but, for the wealthier ones, the richer the less they have to pay attention to the ‘Constitutional’ part. Oh wait! The PATRIOT Act and the NDAA and the Military Commissions Act of 2006 and cops beating unarmed protesters and on and on. So much for the Constitutional part of that description, eh?
FUBAR.
sealintheSelkirks
If you really believe your last statement, then why continue with the effort? A bit Don Quixote-ish, yes?
PeterfromSouth O: Yep, sometimes is certainly feels like it. But rolling over and baring the belly just…feels wrong. Here’s a quote that hits home:
Carl Sagan asserted in his book, The Demon-Haunted World: “But if the citizens are educated and form their own opinions, then those in power work for us. In every country, we should be teaching our children the scientific method and the reasons for a Bill of Rights. With it comes a certain decency, humility and community spirit. In the demon-haunted world that we inhabit by virtue of being human, this may be all that stands between us and the enveloping darkness.”
Smart guy.
And the windmill I tilt at since kiddie age continues to grow like black mold in a leaky bathroom wall. The worst part is that it isn’t some writer’s vision of a madman’s windmill fantasy, it’s actually non-fiction. Very, very powerful mindsick people have made world as it is. I’m sure you can think of a few!
_____
Geoff, you sure got that right. And Wyoming and California have the same number of Senators, DINOs no less! Is that irony or what?
sealintheSelkirks
Evaluating a situation as being “Fouled Up Beyond All Repair” is giving up on it by definition. Pointing out what is wrong without a proposed solution is not constructive.
LA County 10 million people. Kern county 900,000 people. Why should these two be equal?
And, the electoral college was not set up to make representation fair for individual counties.
That is not what FUBAR means according to my WWII vet grandpops.
F**ked Up Beyond All Recognition is the original definition and is military slang for having total idiots in charge of an operation which is getting your friends killed…which is certainly what we got going don’t you agree? The insurance industry’s actuary tables are saying we have an excess of over 300,000 deaths in this country since March…
And I’ve set out ideas numerous times over the years in my replies on the RAG. Of course, like most people who aren’t beholden to either of the wealthy corporate conservative faces of the One Party State DNC or RNC, there isn’t a lot of corporate media coverage for alternative ideas where (last I read) 85% of the population get their information from. I posted this elsewhere today but I’ll put it here in case you didn’t see it because it is an excellent reply to your ‘not constructive’ statement:
Carl Sagan asserted in his book, The Demon-Haunted World: “But if the citizens are educated and form their own opinions, then those in power work for us. In every country, we should be teaching our children the scientific method and the reasons for a Bill of Rights. With it comes a certain decency, humility and community spirit. In the demon-haunted world that we inhabit by virtue of being human, this may be all that stands between us and the enveloping darkness.”
This is also good and incorporates what needs to be done:
https://www.counterpunch.org/2020/11/15/free-speech-under-siege-civil-liberties-and-the-press/
Hey it quit raining, Time to wheelbarrow some firewood through the mushy 6 inches of snow to the house before it starts again. I really need a Star Trek transporter…
sealintheSelkirks
Yes Seal, I served for ten years so I’m pretty familiar with ALL permutations of that acronym, but I was trying to stay SFW, as one does in polite society.
Carl shouted out his idealistic philosophy BEFORE our society got hit by Citizen’s United, which legalized the griftiness that we see now from our Senators and Representatives; drastic measures are called for, and a Senate majority is vital to that task.
But it’s not FUBAR, in any of its incantations. It has just been corrupted by money. That is EMINENTLY curable by men and women of patriotism and honor.
I’ll agree that Citizen’s United brought the corruption blatantly out in the open from the shadows where it’s always been sort-of-hidden from the worker masses, but this never-been-a-democracy has always been corrupted by money. From its founding by the slave-owner rich white men who continued the genocide on the indigenous population to now, I really don’t see anytime in the very brief history of this country when it wasn’t the central theme. Sagan’s ‘idealistic’ philosophy was perfectly in tune with what has happened forever in US politics before that decision was made law.
It’s always been about Class War between the tiny fraction of haves and the mass of have nots. Always. As a preK teacher there was a ‘sharing’ theme that we were supposed to teach the 4 1/2 year olds…that never applied to this society (or most others for that matter) except in very local person-to-person circumstances. Never as a national goal.
And finding those men and women of honor you speak of? Patriotism shouldn’t even be a part as it always seems to lead to nationalism; the ‘last refuge of the scoundrel’ is an appropriate historical description. But when the few who have it do pop up and try to fight against the reality they were raised in, they get stomped into the dirt by the powerful who have always controlled the narrative. Beaten, murdered, imprisoned, evicted, fired, and slandered in the wealthy-owned media to the point they become enemies of the state in the minds of most of the population. That’s how Class War works.
Corporate business, corporate politics, full of empty suits who can only focus on their greed and what their cut is. And the military has never exactly been brimming with honor, either, for that matter. Brig. General Smedley Butler put that fantasy to rest in his little 1935 book War is a Racket. I’ve recommended that book to a number of kids thinking about ‘joining up and becoming a man’ and it did turn some of them away from that mistake. Others…I have attended funerals for unfortunately… The military/congressional/industrial complex is alive and well sorry to say, in control of most everything, and its claws have only gone deeper and spread further through this society since Gen Eisenhower wrote those words for his farewell address as president.
I consider the modern high points of the fight against the bad guys were the 1920s/30s labor union uprisings, and the 1960s/early 70s uprisings. Since then it’s all been downhill after Reagan was slid into office. Think Biden will make any difference? I recommend you look at who he is putting into his cabinet just in case the Republican extremist Federalist-controlled unSupreme Court doesn’t steal this election like they did in 2000… A link that names the names and what they represented before they were selected for Biden’s administration. Why was I not surprised? It’s not looking too good as he dumps the ‘progressives’ and those that voted against Trump (but not really for him) under the wheels of the bus:
https://www.counterpunch.org/2020/11/20/roaming-charges-the-gang-that-couldnt-sue-straight/
Geoff once labeled me a ‘misguided idealist’ in one of our back&forth arguments. Yeah, well, I’m also a Cassandra and have an unfortunate track record of being far too often correct, but I still have that spark inside because I do have ideas even though I’m pretty sure none are ever going to see the light of day in this FUBAR country. But then I guess it isn’t FUBAR because it’s always been like this since it was set up to be like this, right?
sealintheSelkirks