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

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.