The previous post on this website already featured the map of the vote share in the US Congress related to the population distribution. But beyond the House of Representatives the voters in many US states had more to decide on: 37 Senate seats as well as 37 Governors were on the ballot paper. Here are the missing maps for these elections, shown in cartogram manner again. As the Senate grants each state the same number of Senators, a population-centric projection is less useful in this case. The following map thus transforms each state to have the same space on this map, so that the senate’s power distribution is better reflected in this depiction. The map only displays the results of last Tuesday’s election to the US Senate:
Tag Archives: midterm
Mapping the US midterm elections
Two years after Obama has been elected president, another political change has come to the United States in this year’s midterm elections. Politically most significant will be the changed balance of power in the House of Representatives, which has now a majority for the Republican party (winning 240 of the seats, compared to 186 going to the Democrats, and 9 undeclared at the time of writing). Unlike the seats in the US Senate (with still a small majority for the Democrats), the share of seats in the Congress reflects roughly a quite equal population. The congressional districts, which are the decisive constituencies for the House of Representatives, are thus reflecting a general image of the political mood in the US (while the Senate is composed of two Senators for each State, regardless of the population).
Therefore it makes sense to create a different map of the election results for the House of Representatives in order to show a population-centric view of this year’s midterm. The following map uses a gridded population projection and maps the election results onto it, so that it shows the proportional population share of the results in its true dimension: Each person on the following map has the same space, so it reflects the number of people represented by each member of congress. To see where changes took place, different shadings of red/blue have been used in addition. The map uses the same colour key as the election maps on the Guardian website – their map allows you to identify any of the States and gives further details on the results for each electoral district.
This is how the results from the election to the House of Representatives in the 2010 Midterm elections of the United States look like on a population projection (a geographical view with a conventional map is included as an inset to allow comparison with the more commonly used maps):
