Historical Election Results & Battleground States - New York Times
The New York Times is taking a different approach to the general election campaign map. By looking at the 2004 election thematically by candidate and making the broad assumption that the same party will capture those state in 2008, the map depicts the electoral count by candidate. However, it leaves those states that it considers "battleground states" with a lighter shade. A mouse-over and click on each state shows electoral results back to the 1980 election. What I see as a fundamental advantage of this map is that it allows the reader to understand more fully how the editors came to identify the battleground states. You see how close the recent presidential races have been and so I would say they've done a good job in interpreting the data but still giving the user a quick way to assess the reason for the close races to come in each state.
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