Same underlying data, different visualizations

The day of the presidential election, the New York Times created yet another of its superb dynamic national GIS maps, visualizing the results by state with the usual red and blue breakouts. Among the many virtues of this map is a slider on the left that redisplays the national map to show how the red and blue states broke down during the four prior presidential elections, back to 1992.

But getting back to the 2008 election, to see an even more dramatic national map, click on the “Voting shifts” button on the left, mapped at the county level and revealing how broadly across the country voting shifted in one direction rather than the other. Stunning.