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

[drdoug.livejournal.com]

This is way cool, and a definite improvement. Proper keys FTW!

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.

[ciphergoth.livejournal.com]

All of these are pretty good reasons to go horizontal, but at this point I don't think I'm going to go back to it. Fitting into a normal browser width without scrolling is a big benefit, and being able to put labels horizontally is a big boon. Plus it's quite a lot of coding effort to switch between them :) Mostly it's the area around the finish line that really matters, so it's not so bad that you can't get it all on screen at once.

It sounds like most people would do better with a brighter background on thee called states. How come we still have monitor gamma diversity in these LCD days?

[alextiefling.livejournal.com]

I'd recommend sticking with a websafe palette. You should have fewer gripes of this sort.

[drdoug.livejournal.com]

How come we still have monitor gamma diversity in these LCD days?

Four main things I can think of: a) people set their own contrast and brightness differently, and that makes a huge difference; b) the Mac/PC differences in both encoding and decoding gamma are still there; c) LCDs vary even more widely in producing nonlinear signal:response terms than CRTs, and not all calibration is done perfectly; d) people's eyes/perceptions/tastes are different. And then there's a small bonus number of people who go mucking about in their monitor's gamma settings by hand, but that's probably a smaller effect.

[stgpcm.livejournal.com]

perhaps we could have a less black uncalled statue - a grey area, so to speak?

[stgpcm.livejournal.com]

perhaps we could have a less black background for the uncalled states - a grey area, so to speak?