Two candidates, nine swing states, 110 electoral votes, one brilliant interactive flowchart.
Posted 11.05.2012 at 4:00 pm
8 Comments
512 Paths To The Whitehouse
Mike Bostock and Shan Carter
According to the latest polls, the 2012 presidential race is going to be a close one, which means that--once again--it will come down to the swing states: As the electoral votes in Ohio, Florida, and seven other "undecided" states go, so goes the White House.
But the details are messy. With nine swing states in the mix, there are a total of 2^9 possible outcomes in tomorrow's election. That's 512 different possibilities.
Which, normally, would be too many to keep track of. But in today's infographic, visualization all-stars Mike Bostock and Shan Carter boiled the "combinatorial explosion" of possible results down to a simple, interactive flowchart.
In a blog post, the designers explained their secret to keeping the chart simple:
We settled on a binary tree early on, but it wasn’t until Shan had the idea of collapsing parts of the tree into “decision” nodes that the design clicked. By pruning subtrees below the 270-vote threshold, you reduce the complexity substantially. More importantly, you get a much faster sense of what matters: who wins!
In other words, by halting each outcome branch once a winner is determined (once one of the candidates acquires over 270 electoral votes, or they tie), Bostock and Carter represented all of the meaningful outcomes while showing us only about a quarter of the total possibilities (the flowchart displays 140 nodes, or 27% of the total possible outcomes).
The designers used D3, a JavaScript library developed by Bostock, to create their graphic. Read more about D3 here.
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eh doesnt matter, which ever yahoo gets in office we will still be run by the bankers that own them.
i'm "wasting my vote" on gary johnson.
I just got paid $6784 working off my laptop this month. And if you think that's cool, my divorced friend has twin toddlers and made over $9k her first month. It feels so good making so much money when other people have to work for so much less. This is what I do, Fox92.com
John N. Is this POPSCI or the Re-elect Obama website. Non-stop calls, junk mail, endless ads online and I can't even escape it here on my favorite science website? I just vomited on my key board, thanks!
How many paths are there to the White House?
As many as big business can buy and manipulate, I suppose!
I really hate the politics on this site! and they need to deal with all the bots. Yes I'm talking to you ris789.
What's it to you if I believe in God? If you're right it doesn't matter, but if I'm right it matters more than the world.
How much do you have to hate somebody to believe that everlasting life is possible and not tell them that? - Athiest Penn Jillette
Docponystine,
I believe in Science, God, Gods, Jesus and the Annunaki, and past and present visitation by Aliens, lol, Ta-Da!
Does anyone care, I doubt it. And I am ok with that, because I take responsibility for my own beliefs and try to respect others for theirs too.
7 Billion Individuals in the world and I do believe God loves each individual and they\we are all having their\our own experience of life journey.
Just be kind to others, ok. ;)
Why does everyone seem to forget the study of politics is political SCIENCE. So yes, it is in the realm of PopSci. I realize Reps are upset PopSci supports the Democrats, but they are the party of science. If these articles supported Republicans, they'd have to change their name to "Popular Belief".