Electoral Maps and Visual Rhetoric

Maps were very important Tuesday night. A ubiquitous feature of network coverage of elections is the large digital map, coded with the now definitive red and blue. As networks reported races and results, they invariably used touch screen maps to zoom in on states to look at county by county results. As the evening started shaping up, analysts used maps to explain scenarios that would get each candidate to the magical 270. So, as important as maps have become in these discussions, it is smart to examine these maps. They are, despite seeming to be object graphs of voter behavior, discursive in nature, and thus worthy of analysis.

The rhetorical nature of these maps is evident in the fact that, in the morning after the election, my Facebook news feed was full of this map:

This map seems to be an objective graph of how each county voted. Surely, there's no way to spin this map; it simply is what it is. Yet, it's not surprising that this map was being shared by my Republican friends, rather than my Democrat friends. The attractiveness of this map to my Republican friends is simple to explain: it contains a lot of red. The implicit argument, then, is that a huge section of this country is conservative, or at least Republican, and last night's results are a product of those slightly-less-American coasts. I had one friend even make the comment that "ninety percent of the country is red." But of course, square miles don't get to vote: people do. In this way, this map, as a graphic representation of the electorate, is a bit misleading.

Here is a different picture of the country:

This Rorschach Test looking map is a map of the United States, distorted to account for population. It is a county map, like the one above, except that the sized of the counties is adjusted so that they reflect population rather than land area. The colors on this map reflect the election results, by county, of the 2004 election (here is the county map from 2004. It looks nearly identical to 2012). This map is topical rather than topological.

On this map, the red isn't near so overwhelming. And, obviously, the blue is much more prominent. As one of my students said of this map, "this map is a lot more magenta." The highly divided nature of the country is much more evident in this map, and it is easy to see that the population centers of the country  are solidly blue.

The point here is that no piece of information, even a seemingly objective map, is devoid of rhetorical construction. The way that a map as a graphic representation is constructed, presented, and passed around must be interpreted. These two maps contain different assumptions about the information they present, and thus imply different arguments about the political picture of the United States. Understanding these may greatly inform our understanding of the nature of the electorate and last night's results.

Here's one more, just for fun. What are the [barely] implicit arguments imbedded in this graphic?