US Election Results 2000-2020

How did Americans vote in the Presidential Election?

This is an analysis of the voting in the counties of the United States in the presidential election.

Scroll down to continue.

Let's visualize the results!

But how? Maybe with a map of the United States...

Let's add colors

We can use colors to differentiate who won in each state. If a state voted mostly for Democrats it will be blue, if it voted mostly for Republicans it will be red.

So is the US really that red?

One of the problems with this graphic is that it does not show the individual results of the counties.

Results by county

By counties the result is different, but also misleading, but it is still far from accurate as it doesn't represent the actual percentage of votes...

Let's use color saturation

Let's add a scale where darker colors represent higher differences, and lighter colors represent smaller differences. However, this is still misleading...

Geographic area is misleading

For example, even though and have similar opposing results percent wise, they are very different in terms of population ( vs ).

What about the number of voters?

Another problem with this map is that it shows the results by geographic area, and for example, rural counties have a lot of area but a small population.

A circle for each county

Let's replace each county with a circle of the same size to make a more accurate visual comparison.

They don't fit!

Another problem, the circles appear on top of each other 🤦🏻‍♂️...

Respect my bubble!

Let's add a repulsion force that makes each circle try to avoid being on top of another.

But what about the number of voters?

We still have the problem that all circles are the same size ☹️. How about we use the size of the circle...

Size matters (in this case)

How about we use the area (not the radius) of the circles to represent the total number of voters.

Details

If you want to know the values of each county, move the mouse over the center of the circle.

Now we can compare better

With this map it is a bit easier to see how the country voted.

Patterns by regions

For example, it can be seen how larger counties and near the coast tend to vote more for Democrats, while interior counties for Republicans.

What about the overall result?

With the map it is not so easy to know. (In reality, maps are not the best way to visualize data for most analysis tasks 😉).

Let's remove the map then...

Now we have more space to use. But the counties are still located by geographic position, which is no longer necessary.

Everyone to the middle

Removing the geographic position allows us to use the location to encode more information. For example, we can place counties horizontally depending on who the voted more towards...

From left to right

To differentiate the counties more easily, we can distribute them horizontally by how they voted. We send to the left those who voted more for Democrats and to the right those who voted more for Republicans.

What about the vertical location?

We can use it to divide by regions.

Voting by Regions

This graphic shows us how each region of the United States voted. Here we can observe, for example, how the New England region tends to vote more for Democrats, versus East South Central which voted more for Republicans. This allows for easier comparison and understanding of the final election results.

Voting by population

We can also change the vertical position to encode the number of voters by population.

Thank you!

Thanks for making it this far, I hope you liked it. If you have any questions or suggestion feel free to reach out via social media, just search for John Alexis Guerra Gómez.

Using data from MIT Election Data and Science Lab

MIT Election Data and Science Lab, 2018, "County Presidential Election Returns 2000-2020", https://doi.org/10.7910/DVN/VOQCHQ, Harvard Dataverse, V13, UNF:6:GILlTHRWH0LbH2TItBsb2w== [fileUNF]

US Presidential Election Results

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