Mansfield Fox

Law student. Yankees fan. Massive fraggle. Just living the American dream.

Sunday, November 07, 2004

Finally, A Useful By-the-Counties Map

Via Matthew Yglesias, I've finally found what I've been looking for these past days: a version of the county-by-county map that weights the counties by population.

The county-by-county map that USA Today and its ilk have been peddling seem to me largely analytically useless. It shows that the GOP is way ahead in terms of square mileage, which might be useful if we lived in some kind of freehold republic where only landowners could vote and the number of votes each one got was proportional to his acreage. It also shows (somewhat more usefully) that the GOP is strongest in small town and rural areas, and weakest in urban areas, but that point could as effectively be made by stating "the GOP is strongest in small-town and rural areas, and weakest in urban areas". (One interesting note about the unweighted county-by-county maps: if you look closely, Mississippi has more Blue Counties than New York. Zuh?)

My favorite thing about the weighted county-by-county map is that it looks like the country is about to eat New York City. Because we're delicious.