The Road Map to the White House

Dustin Cable of the University of Virginia’s Weldon Cooper Center for Public Service has combined a dot map of votes cast in the 2008 Presidential Election with a dot map of 2010 census data showing the geographical distribution of race and ethnicity in the United States. The map has been created to help visualize some of the nefarious ways in which current redistricting practices work.

The Congressional Dot Map allows you to directly compare the racial distribution within congressional districts with Democratic and Republican votes cast in the district. In the accompanying blog post Dustin explains how race and ethnicity and past election data is often used during redistricting to pick and choose the kind of voters in the congressional district. The blog post provides examples from the map to show how some of the most bizarre congressional districts have been designed in order to pack as many types of particular voters and ethnicity in one area.

The map can also be used to see whether particular ethnic groups tend to vote for one party or another. For example in numerous polls the majority of Hispanics have identified as Democratic voters. The Congressional Dot Map seems to support these polls. If you zoom in on areas with a large Hispanic population and then examine the Presidential Election data you can see that in most largely Hispanic areas most people seem to have voted for the Democrats.

This may explain why Donald Trump recently tweeted "I love Hispanics!". He now seems to realize that he might need some of the 27.3 million Latino voters to vote for him in the upcoming Presidential election.