1. Election Map 2012 Presidential Election

The famous chart is a choropleth — a thematic map in which regions are coloured according to a statistical value. Although there are several well-established alternatives, they involve trade-offs that we wanted to avoid. We set out to find a third way that corrected the limitation of the standard choropleth while avoiding the weaknesses of existing alternatives. The choropleth conundrum In 2012, Barack Obama was elected with 51.1 per cent of the popular vote. This was enough to amass 332 electoral votes, or 61.7 per cent of the electoral college.

Switch to the Australia edition. Full US 2012 election county-level results to download. • More data journalism and data visualisations from the Guardian.

Yet the states whose electors he secured account for only 37 per cent of the area of the United States — 44 per cent if you exclude Alaska. It is a well-known problem: Because the US population is not distributed evenly, states with large areas will feature disproportionately on geographical maps, even though they are sparsely populated and have few electoral votes. Montana’s area is 15 times that of Vermont’s, but they have the same number of electoral votes.

The effect is a political bias: Since large rural areas tend to vote Republican, the map shows a far greater proportion of red than the election results warrant. The map, critics argue, is therefore politically and so “wildly distorted” that it is simply.

The cartogram alternative A more truthful representation of the data could be achieved using a cartogram, a type of map that adjusts the area of states for their number of electoral votes. Making a cartogram inevitably means distorting either the states’ shape or their position relative to each other, so cartograms trade familiarity for precision. At one extreme, contiguous cartograms preserve states’ borders, but distort their shapes strongly.

Mark Newman, of the University of Michigan, produced cartograms of this sort. Having tested these options and debated at length, we arrived at a compromise map for our live results graphic that attempts to take the best from the other methods. The white underlying geographic map places states in their familiar size, shape and location, allowing them to be identified quickly. Using a cluster of dots rather than a solid fill to represent the outcome ensures that the amount of red and blue on the map accurately reflects states’ weight in the election outcome, rather than the (irrelevant) surface area. Like the tiled grid cartogram, the number of electoral votes in each state is easy to compare visually without counting or interpreting numbers printed on the map. Because each electoral vote is a discrete mark, it is possible to accurately represent the split electoral votes that are possible in Maine and Nebraska, or the.

Tom Pearson, the FT’s interactive developer, which debuted in our and our. We later discovered it was similar to the solution devised for the by Gabriel Dance and Nick Evershed of the Guardian. Join FT commentators in London on November 10 to discuss the state of US politics after the presidential election But even this representation has limitations.

The densely populated north-east is covered in dots, making the region difficult to label. This also means the map works best on large screens — on small mobile screens, we have had to revert to the choropleth. Useful for what? So does the traditional map fall short? It depends entirely on which question you want to answer for your reader. If the question is to discover the result in Utah, a conventional map is not a bad choice.

For audiences familiar with US geography, the map for quickly identifying how a particular state voted. Since most presidential elections hinge on the outcome in a handful of swing states, this is an important consideration.

Cartograms may sacrifice ease of identifying states to better answer how important a victory in, say, Florida is, relative to neighbouring Georgia, or to get a more accurate sense of the outcome reflected in the shading of the adjusted surface areas. We think our third way captures the best of both approaches. The most important question for any election, though, is who has won. We have previously warned, and this is a case where no map or cartogram can beat the precision of the humble stacked bar chart — which is why that is what will appear on our homepage and above. A previous version of one of the maps included this article incorrectly indicated that Mitt Romney had won Florida in 2012.

In fact, Barack Obama won the state. Graphics by Chris Campbell and Tom Pearson; video by Tom Hannen, Barney Jopson and Russell Birkett.

Here are the presidential election results for the 2012 general election. President Barack Obama had a, according to national polls going into Election Day, and many prediction models, including and, predicted that Obama would eke out a victory over GOP presidential candidate Mitt Romney. But the outcomes in so-called swing states - like Virginia, Colorado, Florida, Ohio, New Hampshire and North Carolina - are still considered the most important. The map below is updated continually with the latest data.

Election Map 2012 Presidential Election

Click for detailed state-by-state results for House and Senate races as well as information about how citizens voted on ballot measures.