Election Maps: 50 Shades of Purple

Oh, there is so much to say about our US Election.

Relief. That’s the word I’ve heard the most this week.

Shock and awe, on both sides really.  Romney was reportedly shocked by the results.  He had already ordered $25,000 fireworks for his victory celebration. 

He and the Republicans thought all that voter suppression work would succeed; robocalls with incorrect information about polling hours and locations, jail threat billboards about the myth of voter fraud.  He is said to be surprised at how many people Obama got out to vote, as if some magic by Obama rather than his own failure swung the election. Oops, voter supression backfired; minority voters said attempts to keep them from voting actually encouraged them more strongly to go vote.

Speaking of backfire, all that Super PAC money that was supposed to buy the election.  Sorry, Karl Rove ($300 million), Sheldon Adelson ($60 million), National Rifle Association ($34 million) – all your millions bought you not one victory, not one of the candidates you backed, federal and state, won.

Binders of women!  Record numbers of women were elected, now 20 women US Senators, many more women Representatives and in state offices. Women voted 54% Obama, 44% Romney. (52% of men voted for Romney.)

Catholic voters also confounded the vain efforts by Republicans and bishops to fearmonger them with false predictions of lost religious freedom; they voted just like the whole population, 52-48% for Obama. 

White people, well, that’s another story.  “The Bad News About White People: Romney Won White Vote Almost Everywhere,” read the headline in the Nation. Nationwide 59% of whites voted Republican. Even in my beloved progressive (everyone thinks, but really?) California, 52% of white people voted for Romney.  Thank God we are close to being a white minority state. Nationwide more Blacks and Asian-Americans and Hispanics voted for Obama this time than in 2008.  See above; voter suppression backfires. Also – McCain at least seemed to have a heart, not so obvious with Romney. 

My favorite post election indulgence; maps!  I had a sixth grade textbook, Maps Mean Adventure! Election night was an adventuresome trek through the jungles of waiting, slashing through state results, especially hazardous for East Coasters, waiting out lots of bad news before the West Coast results came in. 

But geography is taught differently these days; my recent college grad history major daughter Norah (Univ. of St. Andrews 2010) took a class on the politics of map making and added a new favorite phrase to our family lexicon: “It’s all a construct!” Maps are created with political assumptions and maps perpetuate political assumptions.

Consider the standard red state blue, state map of the US: Obama won the majority of votes in the blue states, Romney in the red.

Boy, are we a divided country. Whackos on each coast, real heartland Amuricans in all those vast red states.

Then look at it this way:

See - a lot more of us, that would be well over the majority, are true blue. This is a cartogram, a map in which the sizes of the states are rescaled according to their population, drawn not by acreage but by number of inhabitants. Rhode Island, for example, with 1.1 million people, would appear twice the size of Wyoming, with half as many people, but 60 times the acreage of Rhode Island.

As Charles Blow put it in a great piece in the New York Times with lots of other interesting data: “Romney also won eight of the 10 states with the lowest population density: Alaska, Wyoming, Montana, North Dakota, South Dakota, Idaho, Nebraska and Utah. Obama won New Mexico and Nevada. (Hello.  Hello.  Hello.  Is there an echo in here?)"

You see, it really all is a construct, how you make the map.  Try this one:

This one is by vote percentages within states. Its creator says he made this more nuanced map because “talking about red states versus blue states in a monolithic way is reductive and annoying.” After posting it on Facebook, a friend commented:

"Yes, we are a nation of purple.  Fifty Shades of Purple!"
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PS: Don’t get me going on how we elected the first out lesbian Senator, the first out gay person of color Representative, the first Hindu Representative, who will take the oath of office on the Bhagavad Gita, the new Representative who is an emergency room physician Mexican American son of illegal immigrants – look out for some interesting discussions of health care and immigration!  Need I say all these successful candidates are Democrats?

Yes, relief.

Copyright © 2012 Deborah Streeter