Prof. Benjamin Hennig
Professor of Geography at the University of Iceland and Honorary Research Associate in the School of Geography and the Environment at the University of Oxford. He is also involved in the Worldmapper project.
Email: ben@hi.is
Website: geoviews.net
Social Media: @geoviews
U.S. Election 2024
25. Seeing past the herd: Polls and the 2024 election (Dr Benjamin Toff)
26. On polls and social media (Dr Dorian Hunter Davis)
27. How did gender matter in 2024? (Prof Regina Lawrence)
28. The keys to the White House: Why Allan Lichtman is wrong this time (Tom Fisher)
29. Beyond the rural vote: Economic anxiety and the 2024 presidential election (Dr Amanda Weinstein, Dr Adam Dewbury)
30. Black and independent voters: Which way forward? (Prof Omar Ali)
31. Latino voters in the 2024 election (Dr Arthur D. Soto-Vásquez)
32. Kamala’s key to the polls: The Asian American connection (Nadya Hayasi)
33. The vulnerability of naturalized immigrants and the hero who “will fix” America (Dr Alina E. Dolea)
34. Did Gen Z shape the election? No, because Gen Z doesn’t exist (Dr Michael Bossetta)
35. Cartographic perspectives of the 2024 U.S. election (Prof Benjamin Hennig)
In 2017, during his first year in office, Donald Trump reportedly mentioned his election victory nearly every fifth day. His triumph in the 2016 election was marked by narrow margins, with around 78,000 votes in key battleground states securing his win in the Electoral College, despite losing the popular vote to Hillary Clinton. Trump highlighted his success with maps illustrating the electoral outcomes, enthusiastically pointing to a map with swathes of red representing Republican victories, particularly in rural areas: “Here, you can take that, that’s the final map of the numbers. It’s pretty good, right? The red is obviously us.”
These maps, however, exaggerated the rural vote by inflating the visual representation of sparsely populated areas. Population-weighted cartograms, which resize areas based on population rather than land area, offered a different perspective by giving more space to densely populated urban regions, traditionally leaning Democratic. This style of mapping exposed the political divide between rural Republican-leaning areas and urban Democratic strongholds – a pattern that persisted through the 2016 and 2020 elections.
Trump’s polarizing influence has deeply impacted every election since he entered the political arena. Yet, the clarity of his victory in the 2024 election was unexpected. Major polling organizations had not anticipated the decisive margin of his win, which transformed the election maps. For this election, even conventional maps or population-weighted cartograms reveal a straightforward victory, diminishing the need to account for regional nuances as in previous elections.
Election maps play a vital role in election coverage, shaping public understanding of voting patterns and results across media platforms. Traditional geographic maps remain popular in print and television due to their familiarity and simplicity in showing state-level victories. Online media, however, have increasingly employed more sophisticated tools, including interactive and scalable maps as well as alternative map forms like cartograms. These advanced visuals enable viewers to explore election results in greater depth.
This map series shows the preliminary outcome of the 2024 election from a state-level perspective. At the time of writing (Nov 8, 2024) most states had completed counting between 95 and 100 per cent of the votes. Therefore, only minor, if any, changes in this overall state-level picture provided here are to be expected.
Each map in this series highlights distinct aspects of the 2024 election results: The conventional map (top) shows state wins by colour but can mislead by visually emphasizing large, sparsely populated areas. The population-weighted cartogram (middle) adjusts state sizes based on population, highlighting more populous, often Democratic-leaning regions. The hexagon cartogram (bottom) simplifies state shapes into hexagons sized by Electoral College votes, offering the clearest view of the electoral outcome. Only the winning candidate is depicted, with indications of states that changed party preference since 2020. This layered approach provides a nuanced understanding of voting influence and population distribution, especially valuable in an election with such decisive results. This map thus offers a clear image of the Electoral College majority that will elect Donald Trump as the 47th President of the United States.
The population-weighted cartogram additionally uses a color gradient to represent the candidates’ vote shares. States with the highest vote share for either candidate are marked accordingly, except for Maine and Nebraska, where the Electoral College vote is split. This method illustrates the growing political polarization in the United States: in the previous two elections involving Trump, many states showed relatively narrow winning margins, with winning vote shares between 45 and 55 per cent. In 2024, however, more states exhibited a stronger majority, with Trump securing over 55 per cent of the vote in 23 states and Kamala Harris achieving similar dominance in 13 states. Only 14 states had close contests, primarily in battleground states Trump ultimately carried home.
When the final results are available at the county level, this pattern of polarization will become even clearer, highlighting some underlying social and political divides. Joe Biden arguably struggled to bridge these divides during his presidency. The impact of Trump’s return to the presidency on this deeply polarized landscape remains uncertain.
This short introduction demonstrates how powerful maps are in shaping our understanding of electoral outcomes. By presenting the election results through different visual lenses, each map unveils unique insights into voting patterns, voter density, and political influence. Together, these maps underscore the complexities of the American electoral landscape, capturing both the geographic vastness and the population density that define the nation’s political divides. As Donald Trump prepares to return to the White House, the maps of 2024 remind us that visualizing and effectively understanding American democracy goes beyond a simple choice of red or blue; it reveals the underlying contours of a deeply polarized society, offering both clarity and complexity to the story of American democracy that will remain subject of discussions in the years to come.