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

Elections

2016 Election in Maps: 3D County Map of Votes

Description: 3D map of the 2016 United States (US) Presidential election. Each county is colored according to the Presidential vote: light-to-dark Red (Blue) equals small-to-large Trump (Clinton) majority. The vertical extrusion (or height) of each county is proportional to the county population.
Analysis: The US is a sea of low-population Red counties interspersed with high-population, urban Blue counties. Major non-Blue counties include Maricopa-AZ (i.e., Phoenix), Tarrant-TX (i.e., Fort Worth), and Suffolk-NY (i.e., Long Island).
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. Data was processed using custom VBA scripts in Microsoft Excel3.


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

 

4 Comments

  1. Dan

    This map is under representing the higher populated Red suburbs in major cities and over representing city populations. Would have been better to show voters by county

  2. Meredith

    Hi – 2020 chart due out soon … hopefully … ?

    Would be great to see

    • Comment by post author

      Richard Middleton

      Yeah, good reminder. I think around 15 states have not certified their results yet. And then at that point, I have to find a good place to get the county results. In 2016 I went to the website of every Secretary of State for each state to get the county results. I hope the data is more easily accessed this time!

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