A Changing Country
The historic and embattled 2008 US presidential race between Republican Senator John McCain and Democratic Senator Obama ended with Senator Barack Obama capturing 349 electoral votes. Obama's Electoral College landslide included all of the states that voted Democratic four years ago. But he also won a number of key states that had supported President Bush, including Ohio, Colorado, New Mexico, Iowa, Virginia and Indiana—the last two of which had not voted for a Democratic president since 1964. His election changed broad swaths of the American political map that had been solid red in recent elections and has now undergone a transformation.
The following maps will look at how voting patterns have changed since Republican President George Bush’s 2004 victory. Some of the maps will look critically and visually differently at some of the demographic and socio-economic variables that may have influenced this shift.
A note about the maps: The maps do not include Alaska or Hawaii because of data consistency errors. Alaska uses districts instead of counties and this data was not available. Although data for Hawaii is available, in making cartograms it dramatically alters the shape, and therefore for consistency throughout all maps I did not include Hawaii. The data for these maps are courtesy of Dave Leip’s Atlas of U.S. Presidential Elections (http://uselectionatlas.org/), US Census Bureau (www.census.gov) and the US Department of Labor (www.dol.gov).