Redrawing the States

This visualization was an attempt by me to:

1. Understand d3 (one day I should really learn it. :) ), and
2. More importantly, to understand just how janky the electoral college is.

Using this visualization, you can move counties to other states. Currently it's a bit difficult to use, but what I found, basically, is that

• If you move the three westernmost counties of the Florida panhandle to Alabama, Florida flips to Clinton,
• If you move the 10 closest counties of the Upper Peninsula of Michigan to Wisconsin, Michigan flips to Clinton,
• If you move the three closest counties of California to Arizona, Arizona flips to Clinton,
• If you move Cook County from Illinois to Indiana, Indiana flips to Clinton (and gains 7 electoral votes), and Illinois flips to Trump (and loses 7 electoral votes),
• If you move Lake County (just above Chicago) to Wisconsin and those 10 counties of the UP to Wisconsin, Clinton wins Illinois, Wisconsin, and Michigan,
• If Camden joined Pennsylvania, Clinton wins both Pennsylvania and New Jersey (and no electoral votes change hands),

In total, if only 8 counties move (3 from CA -> AZ, Camden -> PA, Lake -> WI, 3 from FL -> AL), Clinton wins 301 to 237.

Usage

If you want to try to make sense of the current draft product, then just run

> node server.js

and then point your browser to localhost:8080/map.html. Or, if you want, go here for the latest live version.

Acknowledgements

I ganked a lot of stuff from the interwebs to make this. Here is a list:

• Mike Bostock's tutorial on how to make a bubble map underlies a lot of the shape data: link
• Townhall.com's election data by county
• D3 Tooltips from Lee Howorko here
• Colors for the map from FiveThirtyEight's's election coverage
• Lines in the middle of divs from this StackOverflow
• getParameterByName function from this StackOverflow
• The copy-paste examples from clipboard.js are copied verbatim
• Bootstrap, D3, and jQuery are, of course, indispensable

License

GPL v3