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

[henry_the_cow]

I agree this is a lot better, but like some other people I have problems with the background colours. In my case, it's hard to distinguish the blue from the black. Would it help to change the black to grey, or even a third colour such as pale yellow or green?

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?