A data-driven blog that uses chart, maps, cartograms, and other visualizations to understand important societal issues.

Elections

2016 Election in Maps (and Cartograms): 3rd Party Voting

Description: Map (top) and cartogram (bottom) of 3rd party votes in the 2016 US Presidential election. For the cartogram, the area of each county is proportional to its population.
Analysis: Several states show higher-than-averages percentage of votes for a 3rd Party including Utah (Evan McMullin’s home state, with spillover into Mormon areas in Idaho), New Mexico (Gary Johnson’s home state), and Bernie Sanders (as a write-in for his home state of Vermont). Jill Stein seems to have had little effect in her home state of Massachusetts.
Generally, 3rd party candidates were more popular out West and somewhat in the far Northeast (Vermont and Maine, but not New Hampshire). The Southeast, including Texas, had low 3rd party vote percentages. Pennsylvania seems to stick out from neighbors (lower percentage of 3rd party votes; why?) as does Arkansas (higher percentage of 3rd party votes; the can’t-vote-Democrat Clinton-sympathy vote?). The cartogram indicates very low 3rd party percentages in the rural Southeast.
Methodology: 2016 election data were collected manually from the Secretary of State website for each state. 2012 election data were sourced from GitHub1. Spatial data was visualized using ESRI ArcMap2. Cartograms were made using ScapeToad3. Data was processed using custom VBA scripts in Microsoft Excel4.


  1. https://github.com/tonmcg/County_Level_Election_Results_12-16
  2. http://www.esri.com/data/esri_data
  3. https://scapetoad.choros.ch/
  4. https://products.office.com/en-us/excel

 

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