One more map

I had promised my friend Scott that I wouldn't do any more political posts, and technically this isn't. I have an inherent affinity for numbers, and when I see numbers depicted in an efficient way, I just have to take a moment to appreciate it.

A week ago, I had put up the picture of the electoral map from Pollster.com. Here it is, again, as of today.


Interesting, but so what? In engineering, science, finance, and really any discipline where you have to make a point with the help of numbers, it becomes very important how you show the numbers. Not "show" as in skew the data, but how you represent it. That's why in Excel there are a millions charts to choose from.

This morning I saw the electoral map from CNN. The spread is a little bit different, but the basic data is the same. What they do differently is show the data on a sliding scale. Take a look...


They have the same map as Pollster.com, but instead of just giving the numbers, they give a pictorial representation of them. This makes it very easy for a non-technical person to interpret the data. You can see that for John McCain, not only does he have to win all the states that are "leaning" towards him, he also has to win the toss-ups, and some of Obama's leaning states. From there, you can look at the map to see what states are leaning which way, and determine for yourself which way they might break.

Very nice. I like it.