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.