An Atlas of U.S. Presidential Elections

It's three weeks from Election Day 2012 and their are plenty of interactive maps out there for a person to click on swing states until they're blue in the face -- or, if you're of a different political persuasion, red in the face.  One of my favorite sites is run by Dave Leip -- appropriately named "Dave Leip's Atlas of U.S. Presidential Elections."

Dave Leip's site has been around since the 90s.  It has had interactive user-generated information for Presidential elections since 2004. The site allows you to predict what you think will happen in the Presidential race, as well as each Senate and Gubernatorial race.  You can also make a prediction on each primary contest. All of these can be updated at any time until the election.

First you choose who you think will win each state red or blue (or third party), and then in a separate map you can choose your confidence level:

A confidence map on Dave's site.

Darker states rate as "solid"; lighter as "lean".  Grey states count as toss-ups.  Each person puts in whatever they'd like. 

Wait wait, you say? The colors are backwards?

Yep, that's right.  The reds and the blues are backwards.  Dave designed the site before the 2000 election, when "red states" and "blue states" took off in the national lexicon.  Dave used the color schemes used in some other parts of the world where "red" = "liberal" and "blue" = "conservative."

The great thing is that after a number of people enter their predictions, the site aggregates the predictions and gives a pretty good middle of the road prediction on where things may stand.

Compiled predictions of all users of Dave's Atlas as of 16 October 2012.

Plus it keeps track of where the aggregation has been in the past, broken down by confidence:

Aggregate history for the Republican Primary predictions.
(Romney=green, Gingrich=blue, Santorum=orange, Perry=tan, Paul=yellow, Tossup=grey)

On top of this there is historical data going way back to Washington in 1789 and historical electoral college calculators also going all the way back. You can use an electoral college calculator with the correct number of historical votes to see what happened, or what might have happened. There is county-level data going back to 1964, plus all sorts of other, state-level data.

County-level 1976 data. Note the concentration in Georgia, home of Jimmy Carter.

Plus, there's all sorts of polling information. But, to be honest, there's another polling site I like much better.

It's a wonderful site, full of more information than I can share here.  Go check it out.

Carolina: Just One State in the SportsNation

The Carolina Panthers designed a new logo last week.  It's their first logo update since they founded the franchise back in 1993 and played their first NFL season in 1995.  It's a big difference...

Old logo on the left (1993-2012), New logo on the right (2012-present)

The font choice is a bigger change.  The Zubaz-era font has been tweaked to something very bland. Someone has tamed the X-treme panther of the 90s just a bit too much.

Top:  Xtreme 1990s boom-economy font.  Bottom:  Unremarkable 2010s post-recession font.

Gah. The font geek in me is a fan of neither. The panther scratch marks on some of the letters in the new font don't help much. If one could somehow sum these fonts together and take their average, you might have something worth putting in a logo. 

At least it's not teal.

But this blog is about maps, not fonts or sports team logos.  Let's get to the relevant maps.


ESPN's SportsNation performs daily and weekly polls. Though online polling isn't useful for, just as an example, accurate political polling, it is thoroughly useful for entertainment value. And ESPN does a darn fine job of it.  Here's the Carolina Panthers logo question:

This question is only a screen capture.  You can't vote here.

After you vote, it performs some cross tabulations on the answers, and provides a handy map of the most popular answer by state, the District of Columbia, or the rest of the world.

North Carolina is keen on the Panthers' new logo.  Everyone else says "Meh."

Best yet, you can hover over the state to see more detailed results.

Some questions get very regional results.  In 2008, the Seattle SuperSonics were relocated to Oklahoma and renamed the Oklahoma CityThunder.  Recently, there has been rumblings that the NBA would consider going back to Seattle.  ESPN captured sentiment in a poll.

The Pacific Northwest wants the SuperSonics back.  Oklahoma City wants to keep their Thunder.

I doubt the Thunder would return to Seattle; however, the regionality of the "false" responses in the Oklahoma, Kansas, and Arkansas might show some underlying lingering fears of them returning or, perhaps, thoughts that Seattle doesn't deserve a team.

Personally, I think that the NBA seems hollow without the Sonics in Seattle.  It would be like the NFL not having the Browns in Cleveland.