Paul Crowley (
ciphergoth) wrote2008-10-24 10:48 am
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Second draft of chart
I've incorporated some but not all of your suggestions - I don't quite have time to describe why I made the choices I did, I'll do that in a later post.
Remember, this is a made-up scenario to test how this might look during election night
To make sense of any of this you must understand the Electoral College
Red states are states that went for Bush in 2004
Blue states are states that went for Kerry in 2004
States against a blue background at the top have been called for Obama
States against a red background at the bottom have been called for McCain
States inbetween have not been called.
States to the left of the line have gone to Obama or are projected to go for Obama
States to the right of the line have gone to McCain or are projected to go for McCain
The further left or right they extend, the further the (projected) margin of victory
The wider a state is, the more electoral votes it has.
The numbers inbetween states near the finish line mark how far that boundary is from the finish line.
The projected winner is the person who takes the state on the finish line.
Once the area for states called for one person or another crosses the finish line, the election as a whole can be called for them.
Each state also carries a code such as "CA (55) 18%", which means that CA (California) has 55 electoral votes and is projected to go for Obama by a margin of 18%.

I know the red/blue state thing caused a lot of confusion but it's dead important to the pol junkies, so I've just put it right at the top of the explanation! It also makes the chart prettier - more colourful :-)
Remember, this is a made-up scenario to test how this might look during election night
Explanation
To make sense of any of this you must understand the Electoral College
Red states are states that went for Bush in 2004
Blue states are states that went for Kerry in 2004
States against a blue background at the top have been called for Obama
States against a red background at the bottom have been called for McCain
States inbetween have not been called.
States to the left of the line have gone to Obama or are projected to go for Obama
States to the right of the line have gone to McCain or are projected to go for McCain
The further left or right they extend, the further the (projected) margin of victory
The wider a state is, the more electoral votes it has.
The numbers inbetween states near the finish line mark how far that boundary is from the finish line.
The projected winner is the person who takes the state on the finish line.
Once the area for states called for one person or another crosses the finish line, the election as a whole can be called for them.
Each state also carries a code such as "CA (55) 18%", which means that CA (California) has 55 electoral votes and is projected to go for Obama by a margin of 18%.
I know the red/blue state thing caused a lot of confusion but it's dead important to the pol junkies, so I've just put it right at the top of the explanation! It also makes the chart prettier - more colourful :-)
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At the moment it reads "Projections Called for McCain" at the bottom, which isn't right :->
Other than that it's all good.
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I should probably know this, but by "called" you mean - votes have already been cast, right?
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Apart from that, fab! This format works better than the other one for me.
The thing that gets me about US politics is that the right wing uses red :)
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Perhaps change the “projections” labels to “projected for Obama” and “projected for McCain”.
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This is gorgeously geeky!
Re: This is gorgeously geeky!
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For my money, though, and going against the consensus, it'd be better back to horizontal. (With the labels and additions you've made.) With an information-dense graphic like that, I prefer to be able to see as much of it as I can at once, and having it vertically means I can use half of my monitor area to look at it. I can see the left-leaning/right-leaning state thing, but I prefer the conception of the two opponents on either side of the screen, and advancing towards the final balance point. And basically the winner is the one who takes more of the centre (or rather, center) ground, which is another of those psephological truisms.
(I remember back in the day when there were still OHPs, and someone convinced me that landscape was the One True Format for displays by arguing - not entirely spuriously - that a) our eyes track side-to-side more easily than up-and-down, and b) ten billion TV sets can't be wrong.)
The colours and contrasts are Ok but a bit iffy for me too - I fear you're straying too far in to the terrible world of monitor gamma diversity.
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Another edge case
Normally Maine is uniformly enough (D) and Nebraska uniformly enough (R) that this makes no difference in practice. But this time Obama has a realistic chance of winning an elector in Nebraska. However, your graph doesn’t seem to allow for this situation.
Re: Another edge case
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States to the right of the line have gone to McCain or are projected to go for McCain
The further left or right they extend, the further the (projected) margin of victory”
Will the projections be static (based on non-exit polls and not updated) or dynamic (initially based on non-exit polls and then updated as exit polls and real votes come in, possibly inclusive of demographic correlations between states)? I was assuming static until I read that paragraph.
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I also agree with the suggestion of a white line between the projected and called states. And the labels do seem to read "Projections Called for McCain" - perhaps they should be in the middle of each section rather than adjacent to the borders?
Someone else commented about how it will display when any of the four areas are empty (i.e. right at the start or the end). I hadn't thought of that but I assume you have some test data sets for those cases.
In the explanation of the state labels, you say a figure of 18% means that the state is projected to go for Obama by a margin of 18%. Does this mean that states projected to go for McCain will have a negative percentage (which could be perceived as bias in the chart), or would it be better to say that the state is projected to go for "the indicated candidate" by that margin?
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