Election Results in the Third Dimension

November 17, 2016

County-level results from the 2016 U.S. presidential election

Color = winner and margin of victory
Height = total number of votes (all candidates)

Election data as of 11/13. Full screen version / See how this map was made
 

Election maps are telling you big lies about small things

The typical red/blue election map is in some ways misleading. The one below shows the county-level results for the 2016 election. To look at all the red it would appear Republicans dominated the race. In reality, Democrats received a larger share of the popular vote.

Election 2016 county map

As with most maps that represent information using color, red/blue election maps are great for communicating categorical data (in this case, which candidate won county X?). But they don’t do a very good job conveying magnitude (how important is county X compared to other counties?).

For example, L.A. County alone has a population of over 10 million. That’s more than the combined population of 10 entire states. Maine, New Hampshire, Rhode Island, Montana, Delaware, South Dakota, Alaska, North Dakota, Vermont, and Wyoming together have a total population of just over 9 million?

Election cartograms

One alternative that has become popular this year is to map the election results using a cartogram, something Professor Mark Newman at the University of Michigan has been advocating for a long time. His maps deform the shape of each state/county so that each area is sized proportional to its population. The one below also uses a spectrum of colors, rather than just red and blue, to show how close the vote was in each county.

election 2016 cartogram purple
Credit: Mark Newman, University of Michigan

I like cartograms and use them often myself, but they do have shortcomings. Namely, the shapes can become unfamiliar, making it difficult to recognize what the different areas are. Some people also find the deformations weird and uncomforable to look at.

538 hexagon election cartogram
Credit: FiveThirtyEight

Another possibility is to use a tiled cartogram, like this one by FiveThirtyEight. It’s less weird-looking than a continuous-area cartogram (whether that is a good or bad thing) and the locations are more recognizable. Tiled cartograms work great for quickly summarizing state-level results, as they are used on FiveThirtyEight.

However, it gets increasingly difficult to build maps like this as you move to finer levels of granularity. At the county level, the hexagons would have to be extremely small to get the sizes and shapes right. For all intents and purposes, it would become a continuous-area cartogram like the map above it.

Prism map

A 3D map like the one at the top, sometimes called a prism map is another possibility. By extending each region into the 3rd dimension, it’s possible to show the relative importance of each region while retaining the map’s shape, keeping the areas recognizable. In this case, the height of each county corresponds to its total number of votes, though it could just as easily show population or share of the electoral vote.
 
election map 3d by county
For a closer look, see the full screen interactive version.
 

Credit:

blueshift mapping tool

 

My latest project is launching soon: Blueshift, a platform for designing and publishing dynamic maps for the web. If you'd like to give it a try, request a pre-launch invitation.

 

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Max Galka

I am an NYC-based entrepreneur (my newest project: Blueshift), formerly a trader/modeler of financial and insurance risk.
I'm fascinated by data visualization and the ways that data is transforming our understanding of the world. I spend a lot of time with my face buried in Excel, and when I find something interesting I write about it here and as a contributor for the Huffington Post.
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  • Joe

    Great map, Max — nice work. I think it would give an even more realistic representation if you normalized the height of each county by land area (height = votes/land area). Then the VOLUME of each county would be a represent the number of votes. This would result in even greater vertical exaggeration. (One reason I noticed this was the height of AK which has very low population density.)

    • http://metrocosm.com Max Galka

      Thanks. Thought about doing it that way. In this one, NYC’s four boroughs hardly appear, even though account for about as many votes as LA. I went with it anyway because the first thing you notice is the height, and it might be confusing if the height doesn’t itself have any real meaning.
      I think your right though. Mapping by volume would probably be “more correct.” Maybe I’ll do an alternate version of this one.

      • Joe

        That would be awesome — I’d really like to see it! The height itself actually would have meaning — voter density (voters/area).

  • Kerry Hart

    Last I looked non citizens are not allowed to vote and their votes don’t count. That lowers the California votes bar. Gregg Phillips @JumpVote

    We have verified more than three million votes cast by non-citizens.

    We are joining .@TrueTheVote to initiate legal action. #unrigged

    9:47 AM – 13 Nov 2016

    the 3 million number is removed from the popular vote count, it would mean that Trump won the popular vote as well. Clinton was only ahead by 630,877 votes.

    Mr. Phillips’claims his organization plans to join with Truethevote.org to sue in order to obtain voter information in the states that have high populations of illegals, such as California
    Since 1996, a federal law has prohibited non-citizens from voting in federal elections, punishing them by fines, imprisonment, inadmissibility, and deportation.
    The Virginia report, which was the first to be released this week, found 1,046 non-citizens registered to vote in eight counties, who “cast a total of 186 votes between 2005 and 2015.” – See more at: https://www.conservativereview.com/commentary/2016/10/strangers-in-our-own-land-the-non-citizen-voter-fraud-disaster#sthash.R793lv3R.dpuf
    So lets do this lets see how many fraud votes are out there and deport the illigals who should not have voted and are breaking the law then lets crack down on the states, that by the way are won by Hillary, who have some type of voting fraud. Do you all really want to press this subject?

  • ALM2015

    Did all the map manipulation make you feel better about Republicans eviscerating the dem party? If L.A. County has 10 million people – how many are legal vs. illegal? How many illegal votes did HRC get? I’ll wait

  • Euro Yank

    Excellent! This is a real eye-openner and has helped me explain the election results to my european neighbors who can not fathom what just happened.

  • pleaseanyonebutobama

    THIS is EXACTLY why the Electoral college was put into place so that the leeches that suck on the government teat and don’t contribute much to society that reside in large urban hell holes wouldn’t have the final say in a Presidential election. More than ever, I am convince that the electoral college is a necessity considering voter fraud, illegals hiding in large urban areas etc. The farmers, people in rural areas have had enough and came out in droves to make American great again instead of voting for a career, lying, corrupt politician. Without a doubt, wikileaks proved it.

  • Justin Craft

    Thank God for the electoral college… Can you imagine if those 10 major cities determined who won each year? The rest of the nation wouldn’t even have a voice in the matter. And that goes both ways. WAY more counties are red, imagine if we went that route instead? Popular vote just like the county vote doesn’t make sense. State/Electoral vote is the only way that all of the country has a voice in the presidency.

    • Albert Ruiz

      Why makes people in the country so special they deserve more vote than people who live in the city?

      Some years the red area has more people. This year, most of the country is in the blue. You want your voice heard, but you don’t think people in the blue areas (*most* of the country) deserve the same.

      • Jordan

        Nobody should be subjected to a ruler they didn’t choose for themselves. But since that’s the system we have: The electoral college is the only thing stopping people on 15% of the landmass of this country from controlling people on the other 85%.

        I wish people would take a serious look at secession. It makes no sense to have a central Leviathan government controlling everybody on a landmass this size. We should have 50 independent countries that work and trade cooperatively with one another.

        Ideally, I’d like to see secession down to the township level. Or even the household level. Nobody is fit to rule over anybody else. And nobody who has not been expressly given the permission to make decisions on the behalf of another individual has the right to make said decisions.

        • Black Eyed Peach

          While your points are well-taken, we would need self-responsible, moral people to pull it off, something that doesn’t appear to be likely any time soon.

          It could also be argued that a person who needed ruling doesn’t have the wherewithal to select his own ruler… and a people who did not need ruling would have had the wherewithal to develop a system without a ruler. 🙂

        • rgentbuilders

          This system you’re talking about already exists. The States are sovereign under the Constitution. 90% of what the federal gov. is doing is unconstitutional and the people have been robbed of their representation in the House by about 11000 Reps. No Rep is supposed to exceed 30000 constituents. Right now it’s based on apportionment which was unConstitutionally enacted back in the 1920’s. It’s time to demand our Representation back.

        • http://metrocosm.com Max Galka

          The way you describe the states sounds very much like what’s described the in the Declaration of Independence, and what’s advocated today by Libertarians. Why go the extra step of secession though? Seems like it would take a lot of additional overhead for each state, let alone township, to set up a military, foreign relations, monetary system, etc. Why not just reduce the power of the central government?

      • http://www.aamichael666.com/ EyesWideOpen

        If the major population centers had no food imports from rural America, the shelves would run bare within 3 days. These country and rural areas also used to manufacture the clothes the large populations in the cities wear, but due to NAFTA and ‘free trade’, the Ports in the Eastern and Western cities now service cheap imports (trade deficit generation … thus T-Bond debt), and the rural areas have been screwed. It is no surprise that urban dwellers are completely out of touch with rural areas, or the synergy that *should* exist economically between the hand that feeds and the hand that eats, is given the respect it would deserve in a healthy nation state (not that globalists give a damn about the ‘nation state’).

        This is why the 50 States were setup effectively as semi-autonomous republics in their own right under a Federal structure, and why every State was given 2 Senators each, which is also disproportionate representation as per populations … otherwise California, Illinois, and New York, would effectively enthrone the Democrats in a *pure* democracy, which people such as Hamilton and Madison railed against as a despotism, for GOOD reason. A purely service economy within urban areas which CANNOT create a trade surplus (it simply cannot), requires a greater voice to be given to LABOR WORKERS remaining in the agricultural geography.

        It’s just so easy for cafe latte sipping urban office workers to completely disregard the macroeconomic realities that existed in the pre-globalized United States (the sane nation which hadn’t yet been sold out to multinational interests). The voices of the other – more important – segments of the U.S., were heard loud and clear on Nov 8th, and the Electoral College worked EXACTLY how it was supposed to. Take a look at the Brexit vote map by county … exactly the same thing … Cities vs suburbs and rural areas … a complete rejection of Globalization and the shipment of all important *human labor* to sweatshop dictatorships and despotisms overseas. Yet ‘trendy’ urban denizens like to protest about ‘minimum wage’ and ‘workers rights’ whilst they tap away on iPhones made in Chinese sweatshops.

        WAKE UP OVER IN URBAN WONDERLAND !!!… and don’t keep biting the hand that feeds.

        • JustTheWorst

          Oh, this is a fun game.

          If rural production areas and farms didn’t have the demand from urban centers, they’d be cowpie kicking subsistence farmers within a month, or be forced to reckon with gasp! the global market they abhor so much. Rather than look to their urban counterparts, who until extremely recently made up more of the manufacturing base, for a consolidated voting bloc, they chose to focus on their own identity politics, of race, religion, and lifestyle, than focusing on pushing policies of meaningful change.

          They remain so focused on their purity calls to the Founding Fathers, that they never stop and look to see which of their urban counterparts may agree with them and be willing to help. It can never be working together, it must always be an us-vs-them, since rural people can never, ever be wrong, and if you grew up in the country, surely you must live there forever, and if you’re in the city, you’re only ever thinking of city-people.

          It’s just so easy for gun toting, out-for-themselves country folk to disregard the macroeconomic realities that their children have been busting their ass to adapt to, because their parents and rural neighbors sold their country out to the wolves because something something Christian Nation. The voices of the know-nothings and a seething blame-anybody-but-myself underbelly won due to a 250 year old compromise with slave holders and they STILL can’t admit that a majority of this country doesn’t agree with them. Yet ‘good’ rural folk like to protest about ‘immigrants’ and ‘headscarves’ because they think of themselves as temporarily embarrassed millionaires, instead of someone who can benefit from proposed workers’ rights legislation.

          WAKE UP OVER IN RURAL WONDERLAND!!!… and don’t keep biting the hand that looks different than yours.

          • http://www.aamichael666.com/ EyesWideOpen

            yes … exactly … it is an economic synergy … URBANRURAL. For every action there is an equal and opposite reaction. Pissed off ‘liberals’ (new word for authoritarian babies, I have heard) from coastal cities can’t even feed themselves though, so if a civil war were ever to break out, I know who would lose.
            GUNS ***AND*** BUTTER

            >>> “instead of someone who can benefit from proposed workers’ rights legislation.”
            You mean all the cheap imports coming from slave labor countries that the coastal city ports service? … and the Democrat wetdream TPP that creates a multi-lateral Corporate Court that can overrule and fine Sovereign Governments for enforcing labor rights and product and health standards? Clinton was the poster-witch for these parasites, 30x more Wall Street money, and all the Multi-nationals and their MSM whores whoring out themselves to wrap up the brains of ‘liberal’ urbanites who’s #1 priority seems to be arguments over whether gender is biological or part of an existential necessity. For your information, I was born and grew up in a big city, and a city family, but had to get the hell out of this sh*t hole when I realized that the majority of the people living in it were totally nuts … all their priorities are upside down, and social dysfunction is epidemic. One thing I can say about country people, is they know what the word ‘Nation’ means, and why the ‘Rule of Law’ is important, and I have met very few racist people compared with the city. Cities are the meltingpot of racial identity politics, and the Democrats are the race-baiting party extraordinaire.

      • Rick Wolf

        if thats what you think then you dont understand the electoral college at all, everybody is represented equally this way, and i find it idiotic that people bring this up when they lose and the left lost big

        • Hamoverfist

          They lost but not big. PA and FL were really close and that is all that was needed.

        • Albert Ruiz

          Just saying “everybody is represented equally this way” doesn’t make it true. If you’re going to claim you deserve more vote than I do, you should give a reason why.

          • Troy James Martin

            Albert, what you fail to understand is that the Constitution outlines that the Chief Executive of the United States is selected by the STATES, not via the direct vote of the people. Displaying the “popular vote” for a presidential election is just a secondary byproduct of counting votes in the individual states to determine to population of the Electors to vote in the Electoral College in December. With the Electoral College in place and functioning as it should, the elected president will be in actuality the President of the United States, not “President of the Ten Most Populated Territories in the Land Mass”. You should thank your lucky stars you have the Electoral College to moderate the national vote into a reasonable consensus. Nations who have not had a mechanism like this have plunged into chaos for much less.

          • Albert Ruiz

            1. We all know where the Electoral College system comes from. That doesn’t make it a good system.

            2. People need to stop saying the “10 most populated places” would always pick the winner. All you have to do is look back at past elections to see that is not true.

            3. What nations have plunged into chaos because they didn’t have an electoral college?

          • Troy James Martin

            1. Saying the Electoral College is bad does not make it bad.

            2. Why? In the past few elections, the most states with the most votes picked the winner. The system worked.

            3. Ask the Kenyans about their 2007 general election. You might learn something.

          • PhilGB

            We live in a democracy. Nobody’s vote is more important than anyone else’s.

    • Rick Wolf

      here here , for the REPUBLIC in which we Stand

  • Jordan

    I don’t like that anybody has to be subjected to a “ruler” they didn’t choose for themselves. That being said – it would also be pretty bad if people on 15% of the landmass of a country decided the fates of the people on the other 85%. Solution: Secession. We should have 50 independent countries who work and trade cooperatively with one another. The idea that one central Leviathan system should control people on a landmass the size of the USA is ludicrous at best.

  • Dan Bid

    what if you made the height correspond to the winning margin? at the moment it doesn’t seem to give an accurate impression of the relative number of votes. That info is contained within the colours, which works ok, but representing it in that way rather than height seems to suggest to the mind that the entire population of basically all urban areas voted blue. In other words, it does the reverse of what the problem with cartograms seems to be…

    • http://www.aamichael666.com/ EyesWideOpen

      That is exactly what I wrote above. The 3d map is highly deceiving as is.

  • http://www.aamichael666.com/ EyesWideOpen

    The problem I have with your 3d map, is that it is also very misleading.

    In a large city area which was won by HIllary, the Trump votes are *visually* hidden in a blue column of Dem votes. For instance, Queens County (NY) had 640k total votes. Trump wins 140k and Hillary 500k … the 500k are represented, because she won the county, but the 140k is in this case ignored, even though they help aggregate a very large portion of Trumps votes nationwide. The bar being dark blue makes this look like a 640k column of Dem votes, even though 1 in 5 votes in this column are Trump votes. The overall effect is that the highly populated urban centers *visually* hide very large qty’s of Trump votes, making it look as if he had no support in population centers.

    Your 3d map, AND the 2d bi-color county map, both visually misrepresent the divided nation.

    A better 3d map would be to only present the winners margins in pure bi-color, as if the county losers votes had cancelled out an equal portion of the winners, only leaving the overshoot.

    • http://metrocosm.com Max Galka

      What of the red counties in the center? Since you are looking at them from the top, wouldn’t they all hide the Clinton votes?

      • http://www.aamichael666.com/ EyesWideOpen

        exactly … it’s the same problem, but it’s just that the very large blue columns look far more dramatic. If the map were only to show the victory margin and be in only two colors instead of shades, then I just think it would be less deceiving (I’m not saying you did it on purpose though).

  • JohntheCraptist

    Y’all have Orange County, CA wrong on your map. Clinton won that county, first Dem to do so in 80ish years http://www.latimes.com/nation/politics/trailguide/la-na-election-aftermath-updates-trail-orange-county-turns-1478716018-htmlstory.html

    • http://metrocosm.com Max Galka

      The data is as of 11/13, and CA took a long time to count.

  • Ed Ring

    Love the 3D map but I’ve got questions about the data. LA County went for Clinton 1,890,000 to 620,000 for Trump, a margin of 1,270,000 votes. Yet your column for Cook County (Chicago) is about the same height, even though in Chicago, Clinton got 695,000 votes and Trump got 317,000 votes, a margin of only 378,000 votes. Why is the column for Cook County the same height?

    • http://metrocosm.com Max Galka

      The data I’m looking at shows about 2 million total votes in Cook County. In any case, the height of each county represents the total number of votes for all candidates. The color indicates the margin of victory (darker = bigger victory).

  • Korakys

    I actually filled out all the counties for Wikipedia’s plain county map — manually. It was a bit of a rush job, but no one else was doing it. I used the NYT as my info source and I notice that it doesn’t line up with your map (probably because of revised ballot counts). I will revise my map at some point, but I’d rather only do it once; do you have any idea of when final results will be in? Also, do you know why Alaska doesn’t report county results?

    If you didn’t already think US politics was incredibly screwed up, individually looking at the shape of every single US county will convince you that US politicians have been living beyond the edge of insanity for a long time now. There is no rhyme nor reason to be found.

    (Americans appear to worship history in general. And every time I hear that “America is a young country that doesn’t have much history” I roll my eyes. I live in a country that is less than half the age of the US.)

    Good map by the way. Hex maps are definitely my favourite of the 2D variety.

    • http://metrocosm.com Max Galka

      If you ask me it’s pretty annoying the government doesn’t make this information easily accessible in the first place. For Alaska, I think it’s probably the AP that for some reason is not posting the county-level results, since they are the source most media outlets use for election data. Alaska actually does post them on their website: http://www.elect.alaska.net/

      Have been meaning to put together a gerrymandering map. It gets crazy at the level of congressional districts.

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