Why are election results presented by a geographic map instead of a cartogram map?

Question

This morning (in Sweden) I woke up early to watch the 2012 presidential election in United States. I watched different news sources but all of them presented a geographical map of the results instead of cartogram results, giving the impression that Republican candidate had won the election by a landslide since more than half of the United States of America was painted red (image below taken from the 2008 election, as an example):

As it turns out that is not the case. States that are smaller by area, but larger by population (and therefore electoral votes) have a greater impact of the result than what is visible on a geographical map.

There are alternatives, such as a demographic map or cartogram which display the area equal to importance. This gives a more correct visualization of the actual result than a geographic map:

Still, what’s displayed on the news worldwide today is the geographic map. It may be that what we are seeing is an established convention, but the visualization fails and you need to explain to your consumers how to read the map. I think it would be more obvious to the consumer if a cartogram map were used.

So why are election results presented on a geographic map instead of a cartogram map?

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^{Images from the article Transforming the Electoral Map: Beyond Red and Blue}

Answer 1

People who turn on the TV on election night expect to see the map of their country and see which states voted which way. Those who actually follow the elections and have at least some very basic knowledge of what's going on, also know which are the important states to watch, and they can find them easily on the geographic map. Even those who aren't that involved are very familiar with the geographic outline of the US.

If a TV channel displayed the bottom map, people tuning in would be completely stumped as to why there's no map of the US, and instead there's a cartoon of a blue Batman flying to the left, wearing a red apron and sporting a huge erection.

No unprepared layman can understand the bottom map. Most viewers wouldn't even recognize it as a map of the US. These kind of tools are great for analysts or at least for people who know the logic behind the skewed display and can interpret it easily. But if you take the general population, a large percent of them wouldn't know that non-geographical maps even exist. Even if you provided a constant on-screen explanation (which would be extremely annoying and not really helpful in any case, as this is not something that can be explained in a brief footnote), by the time it would take for viewers them to find and read it, they would be long gone to a channel that does appear to know what the US looks like :).

Answer 2

Interesting graphic - the US looks quite funny. But I think a geographic representation is still best way because of:

• The viewer is interested in what state has elected and which party. This is best shown in a geographical correct map as you are used to know where a state is situated.

• It is obvious, that the USA is shown. No need for explaining a strange shape, that could be the US.

• At a glance you see, that midwest of US is Republicans base and the coastal areas voted for the Democrats.

• The lower map is quite interesting, but I assume just a minor percentage of viewers will identify its meaning. Its too experimental to be common-sense. May be one could put the amount of presidential electors inside a state to show its importance.

• Numbers - how many presidential electors per state - are won for whom are best shown as numbers, because the pure number 272 matters. Or a pie chart, which is good for indicating more than a half.

edit: I found this one with numbers in the states.

Source: telepolis

Answer 3

The point is that the map is intended as an at-a-glance throwaway space filler that does it's job simply and efficiently and for all viewers.

Of course, that's not to say there's no place for maps with more information, but there's no point in doing that unless you can provide a way for the user to interact with the map in a meaningful manner that allows them to easily take away information according to their interests.

So we get interactive maps like we see from Guardian data blog, NY Times and they have much more exploratory intent than the simple graphic.

There is a place for both, but I don't think there's a need to mess with the recognisable constants like country and state border shapes in order to try and artificially force the quick graphic into being an informative interactive graphic. It's not the correct way to go about it and you end up confusing (and therefore failing) rather than actually being informative.

Case in point: - here's the Guardian map of the same information - no throwaway map - this one is fully interactive - there's a small version on the home page today and there's a full version linked from it.

Then as Benny points out - you can drill down into your state of interest and really explore the local data as well as having the graphical representation of both local Rep/Dem split and size of lead indicated by height of county. Brilliant!

Answer 4

The best map I have seen is by Chris Howard.

It combines population density and partisan lean using color:

Answer 5

There is a half way house between the plain geographic map that lead's republicans to think they won (or should have won) because more of the map is red and the continuous cartogram featured in the question. This is the discontinuous cartogram where the sizes of the states is modified to represent the population (or number of electoral college votes, etc).

In this image the colours represent the unemployment rate while the size of the states represents the number of people in the state (year 2000 stats for any one who is really interested). I have an interactive version here.