collision detection: The interface election

November 05, 2004

The interface election

So the election's over, and President Bush is confidently announcing that he's won a strong mandate -- as he put it in his speech yesterday: "I earned capital in the campaign, political capital. And now I intend to spend it." Meanwhile, the Democrats are morosely pondering the reasons they lost not only the electoral vote but the popular one too, to say nothing of various senate and house seats. And the predictable punditry has begun about "middle America", "liberal elites," and the enormous cultural divide in this country.

The thing is, the red/blue split is obviously very true in sense -- which is the electoral college. With its winner-take-all system, a state either goes Republican or goes Democrat, red or blue, with no phase transition in between. But it's equally true that this red/blue geographic divide is utterly artificial, because the vote in most states was incredibly, remarkably close. It doesn't feel close, because the media is obsessed with continually reminding us of red-blue electoral-college map, with its lovely evocation of regional and cultural war: Lookit all that huge, sprawling red space, folks, and those blue states huddled out near the cold water! (That first map above is, by the way, from USA Today.)

But change the map and you change your view of the country. Jeff Culver recently created the amazingly cool second map you see above, which shows the actual division of votes, registered as a mix of red and blue to their proportions. As he shows, the country is in reality mostly "purple": There nearly as many Democrats as Republicans out in the "heartland" states, just as there are nearly as many Republicans as Democrats in the "liberal" states. These voters probably all massively, heatedly, psychotically disagree with one another about who should be president. But their views are not determined solely by geography.

Call me nuts, but I think one of the biggest challenges American media and punditry has is an interface problem: They are stuck on one dramatic, manichean way of viewing the data. Imagine if TV news and newspapers regularly showed the second map every time they talked about the election. How can you look at that map and talk about some enormous, festering divide in the country? You can't. As any scientist or graphic artist or video-game player knows, the tools you have for visualizing your situation enormously determine how you think about it.

Sure, merely looking at a purple map wouldn't change the president's mind. Like any politician fighting in the electoral college, he only ever cared about tipping enough states over. No president truly fights to win the popular vote. Still, symbols are powerful things. The red/blue map has become the most powerful way of thinking about modern America, yet also the most false.

(Thanks to Boing Boing for this one!)

Posted by Clive Thompson at November 05, 2004 01:46 PM

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» The Purple Map from American Digest
Clive Thompson at collision detection does everyone a great service with his thoughts and illustrations on The interface election , a short but sweet summation of the need to upgrade the graphics everywhere. Call me nuts, but I think one of the biggest... [Read More]

Tracked on November 8, 2004 1:56 PM

» Election 2004 - A More Balanced View? from I love Jet Noise
I was surfing this morning and ran across this interesting map - I'm always interested in different ways of displaying information: Click for larger image I stumbled across this post, which commented on the binary view of the popular vote, [Read More]

Tracked on November 9, 2004 9:20 AM

Comments

Two things. First off, regarding the Electoral College, I encourage everyone to read Why the Electoral College is Bad for America by George C. Edwards III.

Second, while Jeff's map is interesting (and pleasing to the eye), it does an equal and opposite disservice to the map with the more striking contrast: it averages the two extremes, masking the legitimate contrast in ideology that's definitely there. It makes the country appear relatively balanced and harmonious. While the high-contrast (electoral map) assumes that a state is entirely Bush's or Kerry's, Jeff's map simply side-steps the conflicts there completely. Don't you think?

I think the real answer is to stop coloring these maps altogether, eliminate the Electoral College, and adopt a simple direct vote where the winner of the popular plurality is the next president.

Posted by: Fishy at November 5, 2004 4:07 PM

Here is kind of an extension of the purple map idea, a bit more detailed, plus cool maps for population density (forgive me if this has been posted before here, it seems a v. Clive thing to have):

http://www.princeton.edu/~rvdb/JAVA/election2004/

Posted by: Jonathan Hayes at November 5, 2004 6:53 PM

In Canada, the "first past the post" system (the method of giving a constituency's seat to the person with the plurality, rather than a clear majority) leads to an even greater political injustice. Often, you have a governing party who has the support of 35% to 40% of the population, but 60% to 70% of the seats. Of course, they act as if they have a mandate to govern, while as much as 2/3 of the population oppose their election. In my opinion, some kind of rep by pop system would be better (which doesn't solve your problem, fishy, since you only have one seat for the presidency).

Posted by: marc at November 6, 2004 7:56 AM

Everyone should look in their history books and read about how the Scotch-Irish settled on the East coast of this country from Eastern Pennsylvania to North Georgia in the mid seventeen hundreds and then hacked their way across it clearing out the forests and essentially carving the United States out of the wilderness. Their path westward matches the Red States as seen on the post election map of 2004. This may not be political justice, but it is a historical fact

Posted by: MC at November 7, 2004 4:34 PM

i sent this post to a mailing list i'm member, Media Ecology.

a guy sent me this link: http://www.cscs.umich.edu/~crshalizi/election/ with more detailed visualizations (some of them, with the america warped to take account of the proportion of voters, looks pretty scary)

Posted by: Nicholas Frota at November 7, 2004 10:51 PM

Great stuff all around, folks. Those alternate maps are very cool.

Marc, yeah, parliamentary systems have their flaws, too -- no one electoral system is "perfect".

Posted by: Clive at November 8, 2004 10:03 AM

Many things to say from my point of view:

-Statistics sucks. I always hated it, no offense meant for those who think otherwise. A teacher I knew used to say that it's the only science in which you can always be sure anything you say is wrong anyway, and it's only use is to determine the measure in which they are wrong.

-Funny you have red for republicans and blue for democrats. In Europe it is the opposite, I wonder why.

-To me the "purple" map is even more red than the other one... Color blind?

Bye,
M

Posted by: Mario at November 8, 2004 5:52 PM

The electoral college, although efficient in the days of our founding fathers has become obsolete. I am not proclaiming an immediate abolition, we have other elements of the election process that need to be fine-tuned first. Let's set our priorities; for instance electronic voting with no paper trail, missing absentee ballots, uncounted provisional ballots etc. Does everyone know the original reason for the electoral college? Back before cars, trains, let alone airplanes representatives gathered at a central location to case their ballots, and travelling was difficult. Rather than having the entire state of Virginia travel to Pennsylvannia (not difficult now, but imagine travelling w/o the previously mentioned modes of transportation) they sent reps, i.e. electors. Now, a system that used to be decently just is unfair. A closely divided count in a hotly contested state can sway the entire election. Ahem, Ohio. Despite the popular vote, not relevant to the discussion of the electoral college, Senator Kerry could have earned many more votes. Obviously, a new system should be propsed, and adopted in place of the electoral college. I believe it was Colorado (?) who had an initiative on the ballot for the electoral votes to be split, not a perfect solution but in comparison to the alternative not a bad one either. This way, instead of winner taking all, winner only takes 6 of the 11 electoral votes or 7 etc. And the remaining 5 or 4 go to whichever contestant was next voted so on so forth.

It goes to show that every vote does count in the Washington race for governor between Christine Gregoire and Dino Rossi. At one point in the election Dino Rossi held a 19 vote lead. The count has continually changed leaders, mainly remaining with a couple hundred vote difference. It currently stands with Rossi at about a 45 vote lead, heading into the second recount. I can certainly think of 45 voters whom I know. Every vote does make a difference and should be counted. Not winner takes all.

Posted by: Madeline in Seattle at November 29, 2004 9:37 PM

This is to MC. I am a virginia democrat just like my father and his father before him. The "scotch irish" as you called them did settle in the places you specified and they did carve out eastern america but that has nothing to do democrat or republican. I take a great deal of pride in my heritage which is mostly Scottish and Ulster Scottish, which is the proper term for "scotch irish". Just as my Scottish ancestors I am a presbyterian. I live in one of the least populated areas east of the Mississippi river. If you would take time to read one of those history books you talk about you find that the democratic party is the old southern party and the paryt that most of the Ulster Scots supported.

Posted by: Gman at January 11, 2005 10:05 PM

Posted by: Gman at January 11, 2005 10:06 PM

Since the election, experts have released numerous reports, commentary and analysis. Moving Ideas has compiled them all into one place! The analysis includes the gender gap, electronic machine errors, and voter suppression. We've also got a look back at 2004 campaign strategies and what�s next for the progressive movement. Instead of surfing around for all the info you need to know, visit Moving Ideas, a project of The American Prospect, for one-stop shopping for all the latest post election analysis.

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