The 2024 US Election Maps

The winner of the 2024 U.S. Presidential Election is becoming clear, as shown by today's newspaper election maps. Donald Trump has secured two key battleground states, North Carolina and Georgia, and leads over Kamala Harris in several states already called in his favor.

In U.S. elections, traditional choropleth maps - where regions are shaded to represent the winning or leading candidate - can often be misleading. These maps color each state or county based on the majority vote, creating expansive areas of a single color that distort the geographic distribution of voter support. This approach tends to exaggerate the dominance of one party in states with large but sparsely populated regions, while densely populated urban areas, which may vote differently, occupy smaller spaces and are visually minimized.

As a result, choropleth maps can misrepresent the actual balance of voter support, making it challenging for readers to accurately grasp election outcomes. Alternative visualizations, such as cartograms and dot-density maps, offer a more accurate reflection of the electorate by resizing regions or representing individual votes, providing a clearer and more informative view of the political landscape.

For instance the New York Times has used a proportional symbol margin map to illustrate the strength of support for each candidate across counties. In this map, colored circles are “proportional to the amount each county’s leading candidate is ahead,” effectively visualizing the size and distribution of margins.

Additionally, the Times includes a traditional choropleth map (with states colored by the leading candidate) and a "swing map," which visualizes the shift in the margin of votes cast for Democrats and Republicans in each county. On this swing map, if more voters have chosen the Democratic candidate compared to 2020 (in percentage terms), the arrow is colored blue - even if Trump is currently leading in the total percentage of votes (and vice versa for a Republican shift).

The “Shift from 2020” map perhaps provides the clearest picture yet of the 2024 election dynamics. As seen in the provided screenshot, there has been a significant swing toward Trump in a large number of counties that have already been called.

The Washington Post's Presidential Results 2024 offers a cartogram view as an alternative to its traditional choropleth map. In this cartogram, each state is represented by a number of squares, corresponding to its electoral votes. The squares are colored by the leading candidate, and hovering over a state reveals the vote count for each candidate and an estimate of the votes counted.