Electoral college

[ciphergoth]

After watching far, far too much West Wing (ie all of it - finally reached the end which is both bad and good) I created this image to visualize the results of the 2004 election. I want something like this updated live for 2008, with states not yet called ranked based on predictions.



You'll need to view it full size to properly see what's going on.

(updated image with new algorithm for placing labels)

Comments

[aster13.livejournal.com]

Ooh that's interesting. I'm busily working my way through The West Wing, having been lent series 2 (now all watched) and now series 3. Sadly, she didn't have series 1, but it pretty much still makes sense. It's very good (albeit terribly idealised in terms of just how gosh-darn ethical they are in the white house) and i think it's teaching me a lot about the American political system, which appears to be fiendishly complex!

[lovelybug.livejournal.com]

I learnt a lot about American politics through West Wing too, liberal wet dream that it is. We've got all the dvds if you ever want to borrow a series

[aster13.livejournal.com]

*smiles* That would be very nice, thank you. I would quite like to borrow the first series, as i haven't seen it yet.

Thank you :)

[aster13.livejournal.com]

Oh - i wasn't fishing if it seemed like that! *suddenly realises how it might appear!*

[lovelybug.livejournal.com]

Email me with your address and I'll see about posting it to you

[aster13.livejournal.com]

Ooh goodie! *bounces* - um, i don't appear to have your email?

[lovelybug.livejournal.com]

jess@spikeylady.org.uk

[drdoug.livejournal.com]

The y-axis is clearly the margin of victory, and I'm guessing the x-axis is the number of electoral college votes - right?

The most useful live data I found was tables showing states not yet called clearly, with projections for them and their electoral college votes, with the entire rest of the dataset reduced to two numbers (votes securely for D & R).

Not sure a live update of this graph would be better. Oh - unless you change the ranking algorithm put uncalled states in between Dem and Rep, and show 'em in lighter versions of the colour they're predicted to go, or grey where it's too close to call. The relation of that mid-point to the half-way line - and the size of the votes up for grabs - would be great fun to watch, and you could just focus on that portion of the graph, dumping the rest.

But all this is supposing the next election again comes down to the results from hard-to-call states. It's entirely possible it'll be clearer, in which case the prolonged period of interest in the marginal zone won't exist in the same way.

[ciphergoth.livejournal.com]

You've anticipated my exact plan :-) except for the bit where I indicate the difference between the anticipated and actual vote for the called states, and offer a choice of different graphs for different predictions.

No-one currently knows who's going to win - I'll be surprised if we're confident of the result by election day. Even if we are it's still fun to watch the result lock in...

[lizw.livejournal.com]

This sounds like a great idea. Keep us posted!

[olethros.livejournal.com]

Would you be willing to share the code? It strikes me that this might map reasonably, if not so elegantly, onto Ireland's three, four and five seat constituencies. (And we're due a general election sometime in the next six months or so.)

Nice

[phantas.livejournal.com]

It would be interesting to see the same graph with the area of the rectangles being the number of seats: y-axis would still be the margin of victory, but the x-axis would be number-of-seats/margin.

Visually the blue and red would correspond to the percentage of seats for each side and the x-axis would give the influence of a change.

Re: Nice

[nikolasco.livejournal.com]

The writeup of your suggestion seems very confusing ...
1) You said "number of seats" which suggests you're talking about congressional seats (house and senate), not electoral votes. Are you proposing visualizing a different set of elections or is this an error in terminology?
(I'm currently assuming the latter. I don't think that affects the rest of this comment, but maybe it does and I don't realize it)

2) Right now, we can compare the the influence to the margin of victory by comparing lengths on the x- and y-axis. We can see who won and by how much by comparing the length of red versus the length of blue (both on the x axis).

Following your suggestion, as I read it, would collapse this data onto the x axis, making it a representation of "how crucial" a given state was. While interesting, I think the current use is better. It also seems like the y-axis would be kind of silly; you might as well just plot on the y axis and have the bars be of equal length on the x axis.

3) You said "influence of a change," which might indicate comparing "before and after," which again would be visualizing a different set of data.

I could assume that you mean "influence of a change, if one had occurred" but that doesn't seem at all useful because electoral votes are binary values; it doesn't matter how much a party wins by as long as it wins.

In the current visualization, you can see both which states would have been easiest to change (due to the ordering) and how many you'd need to change (just look at the length). For a potential strategy, it would be more useful to have the states ordered along the x axis by number-of-votes/margin. This is my preferred interpretation+alteration.

Re: Nice

[phantas.livejournal.com]

it was indeed the electoral college votes, a distraction from my part at the time I wrote the post.

Oh, I am not saying it is better (for starters, it's not a precise graph because there wouldn't be a fixed line to compare against), I am just throwing another possibly interesting view of the data.

What I meant by influence of change is that, since electoral votes are binary, how much a change would affect the election (either during counting or with respect to predictions) depends on two things: the closest it is to 0 and the number of electoral votes affected, isn't it? Or am I just confusing things at the moment?

If that's the case, if you order them along the x-axis according to their margin, the width of the rectangle would illustrate that influence.

Still, ciphergoth's suggestion is a much simpler view targeted at who's winning and how close is the race and, thus, better. This other suggestion is more targeted to how likely is there to be a big or small shift, though there are better ways of plotting that.

[kimkali.livejournal.com]

~impressed~
Nothing like turning such a purposefully complex thing into a user-friendly diagram. Subversion with a smile :)

With anythig like the know-how I'd be tempted to animate it, and instead of bars of colour there would be little parades of elephanst and donkeys lining up and piling up. Oh what larks they'd have!
Although such would rather infringe the purity of it's purpose. Although we can hope that some day electoral systems will actually be taught in schools. THEN there can be enimated elephants and donkeys AND purity of purpose.

[hairyears.livejournal.com]

That's actually very encouraging to see: I had expected the profile to be much steeper, representing a tiny percentage of 'marginal' states in the middle and solid bulges of safe constituencies either side.

This topology is more than mere psephological topiary: with less than 5% of Senate Seats ever changing hands in an election, the body politic has come to see 'getting out the vote' as the key to victory - preach to the faithful and avoid the electoral liability of wishy-washy policies that appeal to a moderate centre.

An interesting side-effect of this is that the electoral gains of the Democrats - predictably, in the narrow slice of winnable seats - has served to further radicalise the Republicans. Normally, an electoral defeat is cause for self-examination, reining in the extremists, and reformulating an appeal to the political centre; but the Republicans who've been kicked out were, of necessity, the centrists and moderates who would've led such a movement.

So it's encouraging to see that there is an expanding 'battleground' of winnable seats where a centrist campaign might be a viable strategy...

Assuming, of course, that the margins displayed in the graph emerged from an internal distribution of political affiliations that mirrors the larger profile, with its moderate centre progressing gradually outwards to the hardcore faithful and the fruitcakes on the fringes: those 'marginal' results might conceal local electorates with razor-thin margins between highly polarised voting blocks with no 'level ground' of moderate voters between them at all.

[mskala.livejournal.com]

I'd suggest contacting the "votemaster" at electoral-vote.com (http://electoral-vote.com/). This kind of visualization is the sort of thing I'd expect to see on that site, and he's already doing the data collection, has hosting that can withstand the load if it becomes as popular as it should be, etc.

[reddragdiva]

Yep, I can see Tanenbaum going for this like a shot.

And dude. Imagine getting to do what Linus didn't and convince Tanenbaum you have a good idea ;-)

[ciphergoth.livejournal.com]

I've emailed him, and got an automated reply that says "I will be off in Oz for a while. My speed in answering mail depends on how fast the mailboat goes." So we'll see...

[nikolasco.livejournal.com]

I've suggested this for infosthetics (http://infosthetics.com/) (infosthetics)

[(Anonymous)]

Nice graph! It's a bear of a dataset to try to represent visually. I like how you can do things with this like "how many votes would need to be swung to reverse the results of the election" by just comparing the amount of red area to the left of the 50% line versus other imbalances. Neat.