CNN needs to smarten up its graphics
9th February 2008
The pundits on CNN (including my former babysitter) are pretty good when they talk about the complexities of the presidential campaign. They talk about proportional voting, congressional districts, the difference between regular delegates and superdelegates, and so forth. But the visuals tell a completely different story. The largest graphics on the set are the national maps where the “winner’s” color gets spread over an entire state, regardless of the margin of victory. Even when the delegate counts are shown, there is rarely a clear distinction between regular and superdelegates.
The Republican race is over, so I don’t much care what they do about that. But the Democratic campaign is going to be the closest imaginable. The viewers deserve visual representations of the battle for delegates that don’t oversimplify and mislead.
We’ve all seen the red state / blue state maps. That’s essentially what CNN is using now. But how about something that shows not only final result but margin of victory. For example, take a look at this map of the 2004 presidential election from Electoral-Vote.com — the darker the color, the bigger the win:
Or maybe a true district-by-district map, like this one by Mark Newman that shows us the party affiliation of the current House of Representatives:
If CNN can assemble the best political team on television, they ought to be able to spring for some decent cartographers.