January 3 to June 3 in one minute

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Saturday June 07, 2008 · 7:24 PM PDT

2008/06/07 · 19:24

In honor of Hillary Clinton's concession and endorsement today, I've created this animation of the progress of the Democratic presidential primary race:

The map I'm using is a weighted map where the brightness of a county represents the percentage of a delegate vote per square mile on a logarithmic scale and the hue of each county is roughly represented by this scale:

scalenewwbg

With Edwards being green, Obama being blue, and Clinton being red.

Meng Bomin

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Thursday June 05, 2008 · 5:17 AM PDT

2008/06/05 · 05:17

I haven't been able to work on my maps as much as usual, so this is going to be a relatively quick update diary compared to normal, which just two maps: a weighted version that uses the Iowa and Nevada county conventions in place of the caucuses (this makes a big difference for Iowa, not so much for Nevada) and a ratio map, which just includes Clinton's vote in Michigan. I added Puerto Rico to the weighted map, but not yet to the ratio map.

Color swaps are at the bottom of the diary. For an explanation of what these maps mean, such as the coloration and brightness, see my last update.

[Update] I do want to be clear that this is a primary map and has nothing to do with the general election race directly. In the large maps, Clinton is red, Edwards is green, and Obama is blue. In the color swap maps below, that color code changes.

Meng Bomin

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Sunday June 01, 2008 · 11:19 PM PDT

2008/06/01 · 23:19

Today, Puerto Rico voted and Hillary Clinton won by a wide margin. However, this was not an ordinary contest. For one thing, Puerto Rico is not a state. For another, the traditional Republican and Democratic Parties of the mainland are very secondary presences. And finally, unlike the states, Puerto Rico is a completely Spanish-speaking territory.

These factors an others made for an interesting set of results. Here's a map of Puerto Rico using the scale below with Clinton as Red and Obama as blue:

If you're wondering what the dark region is, that's Naguabo, where there were an abnormally high number of blank ballots. The only municipality won by Obama was Culebra, which is the small archipelego to the east of the main island.

Meng Bomin

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Thursday May 22, 2008 · 7:04 PM PDT

2008/05/22 · 19:04

With just two states left, I decided to make this map update a little different. One of the major flaws of my past maps has been that it treats all counties equally, when some counties clearly have more voters than others. So, to give a better idea of where the voters are, I´ve darkened areas where voters are sparse and brightened areas where they are dense (in number, not intellectually).

The result better reflects the actual pattern of voters across the country:

However, there are several caveats, as I will detail below.

This is the color scale:

Red is Clinton, green is Edwards, and blue is Obama. Normally, I post color swapped versions, but in the interest in posting this more quickly, I'll just direct you to my Flickr photostream and fix this with an update later.

Update: Color swaps are at the bottom of the diary.

Meng Bomin

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Wednesday May 14, 2008 · 12:15 PM PDT

2008/05/14 · 12:15

In his prediction post at FiveThirtyEight.com yesterday, poblano predicted that John Edwards would win a greater amount of the vote in West Virginia because of a specific ballot quirk: the candidates' hometowns were listed on the ballot. The prediction was predicated on the idea the some undecided or weakly leaning voters may be swayed by seeing "Chapel Hill, NC" next to "Chicago, IL" and "Chappaqua, NY".

And this prediction turned out to be correct. John Edwards had the strongest performance that he's had since February 5, when he won 10.2% of the vote in Oklahoma despite suspending his campaign earlier that week. This time he pulled an impressive 7.3% of the vote three months after suspending his campaign.

Because of this, West Virginia stands out in the map of Edwards' vote percentage compared to the surrounding states:

Meng Bomin

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Sunday May 11, 2008 · 6:22 PM PDT

2008/05/11 · 18:22

As promised, here are the maps from the Democratic primary. Like the commentary I did for the Republican race, this may be a little long and I apologize in advance for that. If you don't want to read everything, you can scroll through the maps and read the text near the ones you find interesting.

All the color maps here will follow this scale (with some caveats):

In the featured maps, red represents Clinton votes, green represents Edwards votes, and blue represents Obama votes. The caveat is that many counties are actually slightly darker than anything on this scale because of other votes (Biden, Richardson, Uncommitted, etc.).

To start, here's the map of the primaries so far, updated to include Indiana and North Carolina:

Meng Bomin

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Monday May 05, 2008 · 1:11 PM PDT

2008/05/05 · 13:11

This year's primary season has been an interesting one to say the least. The media narrative that the Republicans lack a strong candidate while we Democrats have an "inevitable" candidate in Senator Clinton has been turned on its head with the quick rise of Senator McCain after January and the nearly deadlocked race between Senators Obama and Clinton.

As we head into another pair of primaries in Indiana and North Carolina, I thought it would be interesting to look back, but this time at the Republican race, now that it's essentially over. Though it was a much less exciting race for us, it still shows some interesting trends, so I've put together some maps showing the progress of the Republican race for the presidential nomination.

If you're wondering why I don't yet have something similar up for the Democratic race, don't fret! I hope to put up something similar this Wednesday or Thursday, after we can take stock of the North Carolina and Indiana results. I'll also offer some comparison with the Republicans then.

Meng Bomin

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Friday April 25, 2008 · 1:28 AM PDT

2008/04/25 · 01:28

Yesterday, I released an updated map of the Democratic primary and Seneca Doane pointed to this diary from March in which she (Seneca, please tell me if I guessed the right gender) advocates using white as a neutral color in place of purple for reasons of contrast: people are better able to distinguish between tints of a color than shade of purple. This is a fair criticism. Shades of purple are harder to distinguish than equivalently different tints of a single color.

However, I do think that Seneca overstated the difference in her diary and I also think there are other trade-offs that don't make it a clear cut choice. In this diary, I am going to use a single color scheme for my primary map and that is that Obama is represented by the color blue, Clinton is represented by the color red and Edwards is represented by the color green.

Poll

22 votes Show Results

What's your favorite map color scheme?

22 votes Vote Now!

What's your favorite map color scheme?

Proportional two-tone map

0 votes

White two-tone marginal map

3 votes

Black two-tone marginal map

1 vote

Proportional three-tone map

2 votes

White 1st-2nd three-tone marginal map

1 vote

Black 1st-2nd three-tone marginal map

2 votes

White 1st-3rd + 2nd-3rd three-tone marginal map

1 vote

Black 1st-3rd + 2nd-3rd three-tone marginal map

0 votes

Single candidate monotone maps

1 vote

I have a nuanced view that I'm going to tell you about in the comments

0 votes

I have a nuanced view and you'll never find out what it is!

4 votes

I like maps of pie

7 votes

Post-Pennsylvania map update

Meng Bomin

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Wednesday April 23, 2008 · 10:58 AM PDT

2008/04/23 · 10:58

Now that Pennsylvania has voted, it's time to release an update to the primary map. This time, I don't have many variants, because I decided to switch to a different template for my map, using an SVG graphic as the original template, which can be better resized and allowed me to do away with the boundaries which obscure some of the trends between states.

I think it's pretty clear that Pennsylvania voted in a similar fashion to the surrounding states and that it adds even more clarity to the future contests.

Larger versions of the maps are available on Flickr (just click on the image to get to its Flickr page). In the above version, blue represent Obama, red represents Clinton, and green represents Edwards. If you don't like these colors, there are color swapped versions below the fold.

Meng Bomin

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Monday April 07, 2008 · 5:44 AM PDT

2008/04/07 · 05:44

According to Marc Ambinder of The Atlantic, Adam Parkhomenko, a ex-Clinton staffer in his early 20's who resigned from her campaign three weeks ago, started the website voteboth.com, which promotes the idea of a "unity ticket" or "dream ticket", with of course, Hillary Clinton at the top and Barack Obama as VP.

Now, this is not his first stint at pro-Hillary agitating through website creation. He apparently created the website votehillary.org in 2003 and started a Draft Hillary for President 2004. So, this young man has pretty much devoted a large portion of his politically active career pushing for Hillary Clinton's presidential candidacy.

Meng Bomin

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Thursday March 27, 2008 · 9:47 PM PDT

2008/03/27 · 21:47

In the past few weeks, with no primaries since Mississippi and almost a month until Pennsylvania, the focus of the campaign has been off the horse race and onto campaign bickering through comments made by surrogates, candidates, and their associates as the media attempts to boost ratings by drumming up outrage.

As there have been no new contests, I haven't been able to add any state results to my map of the primaries so far, but that doesn't mean I haven't been able to make some major changes.

Larger versions of all maps in this diary are available by clicking on the map. The small maps are color swapped versions of the large map above them. Color swapped versions of the above map and many more are past the jump

Meng Bomin

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Sunday March 16, 2008 · 2:09 PM PDT

2008/03/16 · 14:09

"Respect, Empower, Include." -internal Obama campaign slogan

As you may know, the Iowa Democrats held their county conventions yesterday and the result was a big bonus for Senator Obama in the projected delegate count, changing the media projection of Obama 16, Clinton 15, Edwards 14 to Obama 25, Clinton 14, Edwards 6.

It should be noted, however, that like the previous projection, this one is not permanent. It may be closer to the final count, but like the previous projection, it depends upon delegates showing up and staying by their current choice. I have long been saying that Edwards's 14 Iowa delegates had not materialized yet, and truly, the same is true about the current 6. The process is far from over. It will continue through the April 26 district conventions and the June 14 state convention.

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January 3 to June 3 in one minute

A quick map update

Puerto Rico primary results map

May 20 maps: it's about density

West Virginia pulls a Tennessee: more maps

The Democratic race over time

A look into a different world: Republican primary maps

On maps and coloration

Post-Pennsylvania map update

Unity ticket stirrings from Clinton supporter

Primary doldrums map update: a look to the future

What happened in Iowa yesterday (w/ maps)