A New Map

The following is a map of the relative performance of Barack Obama to John Kerry. If a state is colored blue, that means Obama is outperforming Kerry in his current polling avarages. If it's red, John McCain is outperforming George W. Bush.



Note that these results are based on the polling numbers only -- they do not include the regression -based component of our state-by-state ratings.

EDIT: One way to characterize the states where McCain is performing materially better than Bush:

1. John McCain's home state (Arizona).
2. John Kerry's home state (Massachusetts), and its immediate neighbors.
3. Hillary Clinton's home states (Arkansas and New York).
4. The states where Obama didn't campaign (Florida and Michigan).
5. Appalachia.

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Wine States versus Beer States

Hmm, that wasn't nearly as cool as I thought it was going to be. This is the states split up 50:50 based on their relative consumption levels of wine and beer, as tracked down from this Matt Yglesias article.

For what it's worth, Obama leads Clinton 13-10 in wine states, and 12-7 in beer states. It should be noted that the entire Midwest is a swing region, though.

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Regions, the resolution

OK, this is what I've settled on.

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Regions

Anybody like this?



The idea is to create regions that are politically coherent -- sharing similar demographics and generally tending to vote together. And if you're playing at home, each region must have at least four states and be geographically contiguous, although you're allowed to cheat slightly on Alaska and Hawaii.

EDIT: Or this?

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New Maps

I've replaced the old, highly-stylized but "electorally correct" maps...



With new, more traditional, "geographically correct" maps...



I'm hoping that most of you will see this as an improvement, but I'm happy to hear any objections. We've all become so used to looking at these red-blue maps that I just think, on balance, these convey the information a little better, even if they lead to the false impression that Montana is more important than Massachusetts. If I saw an "electorally correct" map I reaaaaaly liked, I might use that as a compromise, but the old ones were just distorting things a little bit too much, such that it was hard to tell which state was which.

Postscript/Full Disclosure That Like Four of You Will Care About: This is actually at heart a technological issue. I need some way to generate maps automatically when I run a site update, and MS-EXCEL has no function to do this. (Actually, it used to have this functionality, but Bill Gates decided to remove it and sell it as an add-on so that he could buy a new yacht). So the maps you see are generated using conditional formatting, basically by creating a huge grid and assigning each cell in the grid to its corresponding state:





At first I'd borrowed such a grid from Wikipedia, which had the virtue of being "electorally correct" but produced some very blocky-looking maps, but I realized (duh!) that I could improve the resolution by increasing the number of squares in the grid, and then laying a generic state outline map over it to sort of cover my mistakes. I'm like the MacGyver of Microsoft EXCEL.

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