Hey guys. I've been following the site for a couple months now, but this is my first diary.
After the election, when everyone here was trying to figure out what to do next (a phase still very much going on), there was a lot of talk about how to frame arguments, and convince those who haven't been convinced by our ways before. So I decided to make a few simple designs that could be used for posters, postcards, perhaps a desktop background with some reformatting, things like that.
The main idea was that I didn't want to attempt to convince someone that they should make their allegiance to any certain party, politician, or movement; but rather just to present a simple idea in a memorable way that could fulfill its purpose after being looked at for several seconds.
The first is regarding Bush's mandate:
We all know he didn't have a huge lead, and I wanted to make that clear. The proportion of red to blue (34 to 32) is very close to the actual results (disregarding further absentees, provisionals, spoileds recounted). The 1 green figure gives third parties a bit too high of a proportion, but I didn't want to exclude them, nor remove any of its limbs. I also avoided putting only red people in red states and vice-versa, to emphasize how voters of all sorts are found everywhere.
The next is on marriage protection.
This was based on the "Values" post of over a week ago. When I searched for full stats I came up with these 1994 numbers which are quite out of date, but fulfilled my purpose well enough for this; if you know of more recent ones I'd be interested in having them, though. As is probably obvious, I color coded them by the electoral results of the 2004 election.
The last one is on Saddam's WMDs.
OK, this one is a lot smarmier than would work well for my original idea... but it took so little time to do I couldn't resist. :)
Really these were more an outlet for my own post-election disappointment than things I really thought would be used. If you are interested in having them in a higher resolution form, though, just drop me a line. In particular without the text at top and bottom the mandate map makes a decent desktop background.