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

[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.