The Crunch: best, worst and weirdest graphics from the US election

Hello and welcome to a special US election edition of The Crunch. In this week’s newsletter we will round up the best, worst and weirdest election graphics we’ve seen.

The results

Once again, cartograms were everywhere. The Guardian’s results page used three different map formats, a choropleth for state results, a cartogram for electoral college votes, and a scaled circle map for the popular vote margin:

Other notable map features I quite liked were those which included a handy guide to when results from each state would be reported, such as the mini-maps on Reuters’ results page, and Bloomberg’s dedicated map of poll closing times.

The Washington Post wins the award for sheer volume of election results information, with dedicated maps and forecasts for every state, alongside this excellent feature on the swing to Trump (or Harris) in different areas across America.

This WaPo feature included some of my favourite, more novel graphics from the night, such as these pendulums (which are animated but not in an anxiety-inducing way like the original NYT needle):

They also had this squiggly vertical line chart comparing the margin of victory in consecutive elections, showing how Trump increased his lead in key states:

The other notably novel chart from the night was Bloomberg’s excellent Tetris chart of electoral college votes. This chart combines cartogram-style stacks of squares representing each electoral college vote, then fits them together to form a horizontal bar counting up to the crucial majority:

I also quite like Bloomberg’s take on mapping swing (people in the US seem to call it “shift”?), which uses vertical triangles rather than the ubiquitous diagonal arrow maps. I find it easier to see what is happening compared with the denser diagonal arrow plots:

And while we’re on the topic, I’m not convinced either is easier to read than a simple choropleth of vote shift, though I do appreciate the various arguments for and against choropleths, particularly with regard to population density (an issue in Australian politics, also).

However, I’m not sure there’s an issue with population density when you’re interested in looking at vote shift, as I think the main issue with population density comes when comparing total votes or electoral college votes and trying to mentally total up the national figure from the map. If you have strong feelings about the best format here, please let us know!

TV graphics I saw on the night were fairly tame in comparison to some of the wacky visualisations we see in other countries’ political coverage (where are the giant holographic presidential candidates, America? Where?!), though Amazon’s Prime Video did have this vaguely psychedelic TV set, which one columnist described as an “election night fever dream”.

Also this Onion take on the Big Election Map is great, if you haven’t seen it.

Shoutout to tables, the humble achiever

Fancy graphics aside, it is hard to go past the sheer utility of nicely arranged tabular data. Information-dense yet easy to read, especially with highlighting in numerical cells, tables are also far more accessible for people who use screen readers.

Both the New York Times and Reuters used nicely laid out tables on their main results pages, and I just want to give them a well-deserved shoutout for promoting the humble table. Go tables!

Analysis

It wasn’t long after the election was called for Trump that we started seeing analysis as to why he won so emphatically, increasing his vote share compared to his 2016 victory.

I do, however, wish that when news organisations and others start looking at the demographic characteristics of areas that shifted to and from Trump they’d include at least a token disclaimer highlighting the ecological fallacy, though many interpretations were supported by exit polling also (once again, the Onion).

I thought my colleagues did a great job at a quick turnaround analysis of voting patterns with this big scrolly feature.

The New York Times also had a look at the shift in vote by geography and demographics, but these squiggle charts didn’t quite hit the mark for me. I found them a bit harder to interpret at first glance than WaPo’s squiggles we saw above.

Elections are never won or lost due to single issues, demographics or regions but one of the pieces of analysis I found most interesting was John Burn-Murdoch’s column ($) showing that incumbents in many countries lost vote share in 2024. The argument is that inflation has hit people hard globally, increasing the cost of living and prompting many to seek political change.

This is supported by exit polling data showing lower income voters shifting to Trump, while higher income voters shifted to the Democrats ($), as well as looking at the trend in how counties voted based on the average income of the area.

The Jell-O (jelly) map

Last, in lieu of our usual Off the Charts entry, please enjoy this Jell-O election map made using little moulds of US states, devised by the Bloomberg graphics team:

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