Latest electoral charts

[ciphergoth]

So you know why I'm so chipper :-) I'm working on my Election Day web application.

In order to understand these diagrams you must understand the electoral college.

This is the states ranked in order of how they're doing in the polls at the moment; the width of each states represents the number of votes it has in the electoral college. According to the diagram the easiest path to the Presidency for McCain is to throw all of Missouri, Ohio, Nevada, Colorado, Florida, Maine, New Mexico, and Virginia into voting his way.

The X-position of each state shows how they voted in 2004 - so blue states Kerry won, and red states Bush won. The Y-position shows how it's currently polling. The states in the top left-hand corner are the ones Bush won that Obama is poised to take from him. The size of the state reflects its electoral vote share.

Updated to add this chart from fivethirtyeight.com:

Comments

[elsmi.livejournal.com]

That second graph is fantastic in how much structure it pulls out -- the upward shift, the meaningful outliers, everything.

[ciphergoth.livejournal.com]

Thanks! As is so often the case, the trickiest part of the software is the label placement...

[elsmi.livejournal.com]

I was particularly impressed by the z-order on the overlapping circles.

[ciphergoth.livejournal.com]

That's just smallest-frontmost. The labels are placed smallest-state-first; each label creates an exclusion zone, and when we place each new label we spiral outwards from the middle of the state looking for a spot that isn't in anyone's exclusion zone.

[palmer1984.livejournal.com]

I find it very confusing that the republican votes are denoted in red :).

Awesome graph!

[haggis.livejournal.com]

Americans are ... different from the rest of us.

(Said tongue-in-cheek)

[nwhyte]

Where's Utah? Off the scale to the bottom left? (Same I suppose with DC at the other corner?)

[ciphergoth.livejournal.com]

Yes - DC in particular is so far away from the rest of the states that if you rescale to include it you can't see much else.