We’ve revealed a brand new interactive map of the 2024 election that exhibits outcomes by precinct, probably the most detailed vote information accessible. The New York Instances can also be releasing this data set for others to make use of.
The map permits most Individuals to search for how their metropolis, neighborhood and even their block voted within the race between Donald J. Trump and Kamala Harris, and see how vote margins have shifted since 2020. It at present contains outcomes for greater than 110,000 precincts, or 73 p.c of all votes, and shall be up to date as extra information is collected.
We encourage readers to search for their hometowns and different locations they’ve lived in, and to discover change from 2020, to be taught extra in regards to the 2024 election. Whereas Mr. Trump made positive aspects in lots of areas to retake the White Home, the detailed information reveals a spread of geographic patterns and shifts for every candidate in several elements of the nation.
Why we’re sharing this information
To provide the map, The Instances spent months accumulating outcomes information and precinct boundary information from state and county sources. Every of those entities has its personal approach of releasing such information, and there’s no nationwide supply of this data. It’s a time-consuming analysis job, so we determined to publish the information behind the map to permit others to make use of it for issues like demographic evaluation.
You’ll discover that some elements of the map are empty. We plan to publish updates to it and to the information set as we proceed to gather and confirm outcomes, and some states are already subsequent on our checklist. For our preliminary map, we prioritized gathering counties with probably the most votes to incorporate as a lot voter turnout as potential.
Nonetheless, some states and counties have indicated they won’t present precinct-level outcomes for all votes solid within the election. Many locations don’t embody early or mail-in absentee ballots within the precinct information they launch, and since a majority of Individuals now vote early or by mail, we take into account the information for these locations incomplete, and don’t embody them within the map.
How we did it
Gathering precinct information is a singular problem. In some circumstances, outcomes had been available to obtain in properly formatted information tables. In others, information was trapped in PDF information and needed to be parsed. In just a few locations, data-curious people had already collected precinct information, and we received permission to include their onerous work into our map.
When it got here to creating the map, getting the outcomes into a knowledge desk was solely half the battle. The opposite half was placing the information into precinct boundaries, which change in each new election and must be gathered manually.
As a lot as potential, we used official precinct boundaries supplied by state or native officers. However the means of matching outcomes to those precinct boundaries ranged from pretty easy to virtually not possible as a result of precinct names in outcomes and boundary information had been labeled or coded in ways in which didn’t align.
Lastly, we verified the knowledge on our map by evaluating the votes in every county to official outcomes. Most often, the figures matched completely. In a really small variety of locations, some information couldn’t be matched to a precinct and thus was not included on the map.
There are numerous methods to visualise election outcomes, all of them imperfect. We went with a shaded space “choropleth,” the place the depth of the purple or blue corresponded with the main candidate’s margin. This strategy, which we utilized in 2016 and 2020, permits vote patterns to be explored in nice element, in communities large and small.
A downside is that it does not account for population; a sparsely populated space the place a candidate gained by 25 factors is shaded the identical approach as a densely populated one with the identical margin. Since we revealed our map months after the election, letting our viewers see the political character of various locations versus depicting the favored vote rely was a worthwhile trade-off, and we’re wanting ahead to seeing others make their very own visualizations utilizing our data.
This map was produced by Saurabh Datar, Alex Lemonides, Ilana Marcus, Eli Murray, Ethan Singer and Christine Zhang, with extra contributions from a big crew. Learn extra about our methodology and the complete checklist of contributors here.
