I have long been a fan of the political cartography of the New York Times and have often used its maps in my courses and blog posts. But this year I am not so impressed. Consider, for example, the map detail that I have posted below, taken from a full-page cartographic exercise printed in today’s edition, entitled “2024 Elections: The Final Tallies.” As can be seen, a circle is placed over every America county ostensibly showing, by diameter, the margin of victory of the winning candidate in that locale. Counties that Donald Trump won are coded in light red, while counties that Kamala Harris won are coded in light blue. But that is not what the key tells us. Instead, it states that the blue circles indicate a victory by Joe Biden! The Times, I think, owes an apology to Harris.
Substituting “Biden” for “Harris” can be taken as a mere typo. As I am habitually guilty of the publishing typos in my blog posts, I am perhaps in no position to pass judgement. By only my eyes scan my posts before publication. One can only wonder how may sets of eyes passed over “Biden won” before the article was published.
More concerning Iin some ways is the assertion that the diameters of the county circles show the local “margin of victory.” In political discourse, as noted by Ballotpedia,
[A]n electoral margin-of-victory (MOV) is the difference between the share of votes cast for the winning candidate and the second-place candidate in an election. For example, if Candidate A wins an election with 55 percent of the vote and Candidate B, the second-place finisher, wins 45 percent of the vote, the winner’s margin of victory is 10 percent.
This map, however, shows not the “margin” of victory, as it is generally defined, but rather the numerical vote gap in absolute terms. As a result, it depicts total population as much or more than political polarization, which is precisely what “margin of victory” maps are designed to portray. A county with a thousand voters, 99 percent of whom opted for one candidate, would therefore be mapped as having a much narrower margin of victory than one of a million votes in which the winning candidate won by a mere 10,000 votes.
“Magin of victory” can, however, be defined in absolute rather than relative terms, as was done today by the New York Times. But the paper’s cartographers and editors should have let their readers know that this is an aberrant definition and should have explained why it was used in this instance.