I’m not proud of this, but I know very little about what’s going on with these 2010 midterm elections. The New York Times just put up their election maps on the race though — for governor, House and Senate seats — so at least you have a way to get informed in a hurry.
Solid blue is solid Democratic seats, solid red is solid Republican, and the rest are seats in play. Yellow represent tossups. Better keep an eye on those.
The above covers the House. There are also maps for Senate and governors.
Pattern fills are all the rage now. Love it. For some reason I have the urge to look up OshKosh B’gosh.
I know even less about the US electoral system, but the map looks predominantly red to me.
In the recent UK elections, the BBC did a useful visualization by rescaling all the constituencies to equally-sized hexagons. This changed the view of the UK dramatically. since some of the constituencies are large rural areas with fewer voters.
The colors can be a bit deceiving. House districts/seats are based on population, and so states with fewer people have fewer seats. As a result, you have less populous, Republican states looking solid red. Montana only has one House member, but he’s a Republican, so the whole state is Red. Similarly, South Dakota has only one House member, she’s a Democrat, so the whole state is colored blue.
It looks to me as though the colors on this map are backwards, in the sense that the “interesting” data points are the ones near the middle, rather than the extremes. I’d rather see the solid districts in the background.
I wonder if there’s a good translation of this data to a bubble map, like the one found here:
http://politicalmaps.org/2008-newspaper-endorsements-map/
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I love the pattern fills too. Better for accessibility.
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