Second draft of chart

[ciphergoth]

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

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 :-)

Comments

[mooism.livejournal.com]

It strikes me that at 2:30am I might care more about when the polls in a state close (and thus when I can expect the state to be called; this would make to-close-to-call states more obvious) than which way the state voted last time. (And I count myself as a pol junky.)