Make tilegrams in R with tilegramsR

In this busy election season (here in the US, at least), we're seeing a lot of maps. Some states are red, some states are blue. But there's a problem: voters are not evenly distributed throughout the United States. In this map (the firethirtyeight.com US election forecast on October 13) Montana (MT) is a large state shaded red, but only represents 3 of the 538 Electoral College votes. In the big scheme of things, the outcome in Montana doesn't have much impact on the election. Contrast that with the much smaller state New Jersey with 14 electoral votes: a state so small that its label (NJ) doesn't even fit on the map. A pixel in New Jersey represents almost 80x the voting power of a pixel in Montana, but because of its sheer size Montana dominates on the map. 

This wouldn't be a problem if all states had an area directly proportional to the number of Electoral College votes, but that's not the case. But we can fix the problem, and make each state represent its voting power proportionately, by instead using a tiled cartogram, or tilegram. FiveThirtyEight helpfully provides a tilegram of its electoral forecasts as well:

This map gives a much better representative of Clinton's (blue) lead in the race over Trump (red), currently standing at 339 to 199 electoral college votes. 

You can make tilegrams in R, thanks to the tilegramsR package by Bhaskar Karambelkar, and available on Github. Specifically, tilegramR provides spatial objects representing the US states scaled by electoral college votes or population, which you can then use in conjunction with the leaflet package to produce maps (and even add interactivity like pop-up data, if you wish). This RPubs page give several examples of creating tilegrams, as well as this map scaled by electoral college votes.

For more on the tilegramsR package, check out it home on Github linked below.

[Updated October 17 2016: corrected tilegramsR electoral college map above]

Github (bhaskarvk): tilegramsR (via FlowingData)

 

Comments

[Oldgulph]

By 2020, the National Popular Vote bill could guarantee the presidency to the candidate who receives the most popular votes in the country, by changing state winner-take-all laws (not mentioned in the U.S. Constitution, but later enacted by 48 states), without changing anything in the Constitution, using the built-in method that the Constitution provides for states to make changes.

Every vote, everywhere, for every candidate, would be politically relevant and equal in every presidential election.
No more distorting and divisive red and blue state maps of predictable outcomes.
No more handful of 'battleground' states (where the two major political parties happen to have similar levels of support among voters) where voters and policies are more important than those of the voters in 38+ predictable states that have just been 'spectators' and ignored after the conventions.

The bill would take effect when enacted by states with a majority of the electoral votes—270 of 538.
All of the presidential electors from the enacting states will be supporters of the presidential candidate receiving the most popular votes in all 50 states (and DC)—thereby guaranteeing that candidate with an Electoral College majority.

The bill was approved this year by a unanimous bipartisan House committee vote in both Georgia (16 electoral votes) and Missouri (10).
The bill has passed 34 state legislative chambers in 23 rural, small, medium, large, red, blue, and purple states with 261 electoral votes.
The bill has been enacted by 11 small, medium, and large jurisdictions with 165 electoral votes – 61% of the 270 necessary to go into effect.

NationalPopularVote

[James Lucas]

Oldgulph. It will never happen.

[Christopher Hane]

Errors in the map showing DE DC RI with 1 vote. Minimum is 3 even for DC.

[David Smith]

@Christopher, that was my bad -- I grabbed the wrong map from Bhaksar's RPubs pages. Corrected above.