caitlin gannon

Maps depicting the current standings in Electoral College votes for the presidency are in every newspaper. We are accustomed to viewing the political landscape in state-sized chunks, since that’s how the final votes are tallied.

The New York Times, in my opinion a leader in data visualization (both interactive and print), offers a nicely designed map that allows you to drill down by state into the details of whether the state is blue, red, or in between.

This state-by-state comparison, however, does little to show the real diversity underlying the single color applied to that state’s terrain. My home state of New Mexico, for example, may be blue-ish in the the above map, but it’s a state composed of very different voting communities (compare Santa Fe or Los Alamos to the rest of the state’s ranching communities and disadvantaged rural towns).

The Christian Science Monitor’s political map breaks out of the state-by-state mold and takes a look at just this sort of diversity. Patchwork Nation presents the nation’s voters in the context of their communities: Monied Burbs, Service Worker Centers, Military Bastions, Tractory Country, etc.

Focusing on the characteristics of each county in a state paints a much more detailed — and more complicated — picture of the American political landscape. Clearly it’s not quite so simple as red, blue, or in-between.