Wall Street Journal Interactive Electoral College Map

You Decide the Election:  Interactive Electoral College Map

The Wall Street Journal has created an online interactive Electoral College map for the November 2016 presidential election.  The Web page displays a cartogram with a box for each state’s electoral votes, or users can switch to a geographic map of the states.  (On the map, scroll over each state to see how many electors are available).  The cartogram/map depicts the results from the 2012 election, where President Obama received 332 electoral votes and Mitt Romney received 206 votes (270 electoral votes are needed to win the election).

Users can then click on each state to change the results from Republican to Democrat or vice versa to forecast the results of the 2016 election.  The creators of the map made switching the results of battleground states quick and easy, but changing the results of historically partisan states (like California and Texas) is more difficult to switch.

The page then details some of the historic information involving the Electoral College and the presidential elections.  The results of the 2012 election are described in relation to the ten states considered battleground states.  A chart showing Electoral votes by voting pattern since 2000 is provided with bases interpreted.  A review of the ten states with the narrowest margins of victory is shown, with Florida and North Carolina being the two closest elections.  A review of Republican-targeted “overwhelmingly white states of the industrial Midwest” is detailed, and demographic-targeted states for the Democrats like Georgia and Arizona are also considered.  Finally a map of polling and ratings data is provided.  (Tabs at the top of the page display each map).