Post-election sideshow

For our readers' convenience and entertainment, Silver Chips Online has compiled several maps of the American political landscape.

Since the election, newly configured maps of the divided American electorate have been making rounds on the Internet. Despondent Democrats sick of looking at the original electoral map dominated by red ink can find some solace in the cartographic works of art created by a team of physicists at the University of Michigan.

In the cartogram below, the states have been rescaled according to population. States are drawn with a size proportional to their number of inhabitants, not to their land size. As a result, states with more people appear larger than states with fewer people. Rhode Island, for example, which has a population of 1.1 million, is about twice the size of Wyoming, which has a population of around half a million.

More maps can be found here.

These maps compare the results of the 2004 presidential election with the pre-Civil War divide between the free states and the slave states. Free states are shown in green, slave states are shown in red and territories open to slavery are shown in brown.

Source: thechrisproject.com

The map below shows average income for each state.

Data found here.

The map below shows the average IQ for each state, as estimated from SAT and ACT scores.

The New York Times recently ran a story on divorce rates for each state. It can be found here.

To suggest additional vote correlations for Silver Chips Online to investigate, please submit a comment.