2012 Election Results!

Map courtesy of RealClearPolitics.com

Now that the 2012 election results are in every self-respecting news network has the generic "electoral map" somewhere on their front page. It's basically a requirement for the next few days until people stop caring and the news moves on to the next best topic. This time of year lends itself perfectly to cartographic reviews because every news outlet is displaying the same information, just in slightly different ways. Here is what I think of a few.


1.) Politico has a great interactive map that allows you to drill down from the state level to the county level, and really see how each area of the state voted. It will also display the percent of the population and raw numbers that voted for each candidate. I have three gripes. First, the colors are a bit too vivid for my taste. They tend to distract me from the subject of the map. Second, for whatever reason they used a very detailed coastlines. I love detail, but the map purpose suggest that I don't need to see every island off the coast of Alaska. Lastly, and this is a common theme, Politico has decided to leave Florida as "undecided". I understand trying to avoid making wrong assumptions, but Obama won.

2.) Google is getting more and more into the geospatial realm, and here they put out a great election results map. First, it's stupid fast and is built on top of the Google Maps application. Colors are transparent overlays so you can see who won in each state but still see cities, major roads, and water bodies. Just like political each state is interactive and drills down to county level results. Lastly, Google is a bit more informed than Politico and correctly has Florida in the Obama camp. This is probably the best overall map.

3.) The best is from the Huffington Post. It has a great color scheme that is subdued yet vivid enough to tell the story, uses elegant white lines to outline shape polygons, and doesn't dance around the fact that Obama has indeed won Florida. Basically, it's similar to the Google map but uses awesome white outlines. Huffington Post wins!