Almost every part of America drifted right this election (even if some of that drift was because so many liberals seem to have sat out of voting altogether).
And yet, the red-and-blue election-night map seared into our brains can be misleading. Even when a Democrat wins, the country still looks like a sea of red, dominated by a rural monoculture. And that’s because states like Wyoming, with small populations and just two electoral votes, are so much bigger in landmass than dense urban areas like New York, with its 28 electoral votes.
So what did this election really look like? By resizing each state by its respective electoral votes, the Belgian designer Karim Douïeb—who runs his own company called Jetpack.AI—gives us a much better representation of how much each of these red and blue game pieces matter.
No stranger to creating viral election graphics, Douïeb’s latest map shrinks and grows each U.S. state to be proportionate to its electoral votes. (The technical term of this is a “non-contiguous cartogram,” an approach to data visualization developed in the 1970s by Judy Olson to chart populations by state.)
It’s fascinating to see what changes on the rebalanced map—and what doesn’t. The entire red column from North Dakota to all the way south to Texas shrinks, accompanied by western states like Idaho and Wyoming—making the string of small east coast blue states more prominent even though they maintain a similar size. Trump still wins this map solidly, just as he won the election. But it’s also easier to see how, if just a few states flipped differently, the split of red and blue would be more even—and almost in line with the actual population.
But if this approach to mapping is so clear, why are we only seeing it now rather than on election night? “It mostly comes down to familiarity. The public isn’t used to these maps, and some media outlets worry they might lose their audience by straying from traditional visuals,” says Douïeb, before noting that publications like the New York Times and Washington Post are both getting more bold and experimental in data presentation. “I believe these representations will gain popularity as media continue to explore innovative visual tools and as audiences learn to read them,” he says.