Best political map of the election

Mark Newman’s election maps reinforce just how hard it is to come up with anything new. I was thinking to myself on election night that the maps we have are nearly useless for helping people understand how the election is going. Instead of geographic area, the sizes of the states ought to reflect their electoral weight. Of course, Newman has been doing this since 2004.

We can correct for this by making use of a cartogram, a map in which the sizes of states are rescaled according to their population. That is, states are drawn with size proportional not to their acreage but to the number of their inhabitants, states with more people appearing larger than states with fewer, regardless of their actual area on the ground. On such a map, for example, the state of Rhode Island, with its 1.1 million inhabitants, would appear about twice the size of Wyoming, which has half a million, even though Wyoming has 60 times the acreage of Rhode Island.

Mark Newman's 2008 Electiooral Vote Cartogram