Electoral Geography

Traditional Electoral Geography

Producing a map of election results is the most basic technique in electoral geography. These maps reveal the relative strength of support for candidates, parties, or referenda in different regions and are now often a prominent feature of election coverage in the popular media. The infamous red-blue map of the United States from the 2004 election, for example, showed Republican support stretching across a vast area of the country, while Democratic strength was concentrated in the northeast, the west coast, border regions, and scattered counties in the Midwest (Figure 1). On the basis of this map, Republican candidate George Bush appeared to enjoy broad support across the country.

Yet such simple maps can mislead in at least two ways. First, using only two colors disguises variations in strength among regions, with areas won by a landslide appearing the same as counties won by narrow margins. Better cartographic techniques—using gradations of color, for example—can overcome such problems.

Figure 1 Choropleth map of counties won by President George Bush (Republican candidate) and Senator John Kerry (Democratic candidate) in the 2004 U.S. presidential election

Source: Michael Gastner, Cosma Shalizi, and Mark Newman, University of Michigan. Retrieved January 30, 2010, from http://www-personal.umich.edu/~mejn/election. Copyright © 2008 M. E. J. Newman. Used with permission.

Figure 2 Cartogram by population of counties won by President George Bush (Republican candidate) and Senator John Kerry (Democratic candidate) in the 2004 U.S. presidential election

Source: Michael Gastner, Cosma Shalizi, and Mark Newman, University of Michigan. Retrieved January 30, 2010, from http://www-personal.umich.edu/~mejn/election. Copyright © 2008 M. E. J. Newman. Used with permission.

The second, and more fundamental, problem is that such maps represent area rather than votes or population size. In this case, the map appears to be almost overwhelmingly red, although President Bush won by less than 2.5% of the popular vote (3.3 million votes nationally) and by just over 6% (34) of electoral college votes. Using a cartogram where the sizes of counties correspond to their populations produces a map with areas of red and blue that are more nearly equal but at the cost of distorting the shape of county, state, and national boundaries (Figure 2).

Despite these limitations, such descriptive maps or cartograms can provide a vivid and easily understood snapshot of political patterns for particular elections. Comparing a series of maps based on several elections, or a single map based on data from a series of contests, can reveal relatively stable political patterns, as well as areas of change. Particularly stable patterns can be used to identify and classify regional political cultures. Daniel Elazar, for example, divided the United States into three political cultural regions: Moral, Individual, and Traditional. These regions tend to consistently vote differently than each other over a series of elections, suggesting that each area has a different political culture.

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