Posted to Tumblr on 10/4/2013 to infovis658:
This series of geographic representations of voting patterns in the U.S. by Elizabeth Anderson and Jeffrey Jones of the University of Michigan focuses on changes over time in the Southern states, particularly the early strength of the Democratic Party in the South and events that precipitated the dissipation of the Democratic hold on the South. It spans the years from Post-Civil War 1868 to the 1984 Presidential election. I was interested in exploring this topic after getting into an online debate with my cousin, who was insisting that Southern Democrats remain responsible for inequalities in minority voter populations. My contention was that the Southern Democratic power base began to lose strength after the Civil War and had dissolved by the time of the Reagan administration.
In a series of twelve slides, this presentation tells a story of the transformation of the Southern voter from a solidly Democratic block to a more diverse political region in the 1980s. It takes the viewer through the history of the Civil War and Reconstruction to the KKK’s terrorist campaign to eliminate black representation, and then compares the election results of the Presidential and Congressional campaigns of 1900, 1922, and 1948 and the results of the 1964 and 1968 campaigns, which showed a decline in Democratic support in the region. I was very interested to learn that Nixon had initially rejected running an overtly racist campaign, but then pushed ahead with the so-called “Southern Strategy,” which indeed broke up what had been the Democratic party’s “Solid South.” The series ends with a statement that racism in Republican campaigns remained covert and coded into the 1984 campaign.
While the data presented did support my argument, there were some problems with the presentation that caused some initial confusion when reviewing the slides. But first I do want to point out that I was pleased to see the data was represented on a scale from 0 to 100% throughout the presentation, which is generally good practice. I would have preferred that the colors ranged from white to dark rather than the full spectrum. Also, because generally the maps compare Democratic and Republican parties, and the differences are stark on most of the images, the juxtaposition of strong blue and red hues violates MacDonald’s color selection guideline for preventing depth perception problems and confusing afterimages. It does include a color key, as recommended by MacDonald, and the researcher limited the scale to five colors, which is also recommended.
One thing that was confusing was that the data being measured from one slide to the next was often the opposite that one would expect. For example, the data for the 1922 Congressional election shows the percent vote for Republican candidates, with a farily solid blue (0%) bloc in the Southern states. The following slide showing the percent vote for Democratic Congressional candidates in 1948 flipped the colors as most of the South is red (100%) except for Florida and the area around Atlanta and northern Georgia. This required a shift in thinking about the colors, since the data showing a blue bloc shifting to an almost entirely red bloc in the next slide, seems to indicate a drastically different story when it was intended to show a similar idea.
Source: Anderson, E. and J. Jones. (September 2002). Race, voting rights and segregation: rise and fall of the black voter. Retrieved from http://www.umich.edu/~lawrace/votetour1.htm
Reference: MacDonald, Lindsay W. (1999). “Using Color Effectively in Computer Graphics” Computer Graphics and Applications, IEEE 19(4): 20–35