Good morning, John. I'm gonna talk today about why I think a lot of the maps that we see around elections are kinda lying to us, and I do think that they are.

But first, let's talk a little bit about what I think makes a graphical representation of data into a thing that is lying by looking at this graph.

This is a graph that was posted on Twitter and then spread a lot around Twitter in order to show how odd it was that Joe Biden got so many votes in the 2020 election, almost as if a bunch of those votes were fake, but then they weren't able to fake it this time for a reason.I mean, look, Joe Biden got almost double what Kamala Harris got, except you're smart enough that you check and you see that the zero on the x-axis was 50 million people, so it actually looks more like this. And also, you probably instinctively know that Joe Biden didn't get double the votes of Kamala Harris, so it would probably raise a red flag and you'd check. But there's actually a much worse graph crime going on here that you probably didn't see–it's the kind that we see more and more these days when the job of being the media has spread to just whoever can get the most attention at any given moment–which is that the data is wrong.

The 2024 column here is the number of votes that have been counted so far. California counts ballots extremely slowly because their laws are kind of weird, and so do several of the other west coast states. So saying, “Isn't it weird that Joe Biden got so many votes? I'm just asking questions. Where did those votes come from? Fill in the blank with your own biases” means that this graph was either created by someone who was ignorant or someone who had bad intentions. The point here is that this graph lied in two very different ways.

First, by having wrong data, which is kind of unforgivable. But leaving that aside, if it were correct data, in my book, it would still be kinda lying because it would have exaggerated the difference by using a non-zero x-axis. It would have all of the information to 
help you understand what it actually meant, but the point of a graphical representation of data is to help you understand the actual situation, and I think it would still be failing at that. So with all that in mind, let's talk about how some of these election maps sometimes put incorrect ideas into our heads.

But first, for backers of the Book of Good Times, about 20% of people have not yet sent us their addresses, and we're going to start shipping those out next week. There is an email in your inbox with a survey that you need to fill out so we can send you your book. It's from Kickstarter. You can search for it. So do that now, please. It will make life much easier for the warehouse team. But back to the maps.

I probably do not need to go into the fact that maps like this make it seem like the whole country votes Trump. But importantly, land does not vote. There's only one reason to make a map like this–it's to make it look like people who live in cities don't matter. But there is a reason to make a map like this, but it still has this same problem, which is why some places use variations to show the actual electoral power of each state. But the main thing these maps are trying to do is not show you who voted how, they're trying to tell you who won the election. The President of the United States is elected by the states, not by the citizens. So we look at the states, not the citizens. But still, we look at these maps and we think they are representing humans rather than states. Now, if we actually want to know how people voted, we need a map that shows color gradients, because, trust me, as a person who lives in a red state, I don't like that my existence gets completely ignored by electoral maps. But then, maybe we also still have to correct for population, which makes maps look super weird.

But I also feel like we need to talk about these maps, these vote swing maps, which have become all the rage because they do show something important, but the important thing they show is very specific and not entirely what it seems. These maps tell you the 2020-2024 percentage difference between the spread between Republicans and Democrats in every county in America, which is a sentence that I find much more confusing than I initially find the map to be. My brain looks at the map and it says, this is how many more people voted for Trump this time rather than the last time, but that's not necessarily true. Now, if I'm thinking hard, I might think, oh, well, it could be that Donald Trump got the same number of votes, but Kamala Harris got fewer than Joe Biden. But it could also mean that they both got fewer, but Trump still increased his margin or they both got more and Trump increased his margin. It only shows the percentage increase in the margin, no absolute numbers at all. This also means that it still suffers from similar problems to electoral maps with a special one of its own, which is that this is a county-by-county map, which means that areas with a lot of red aren't necessarily areas with huge swings. Instead, they are areas with small counties, and some states have way more counties than others. Alaska doesn't have counties at all. I didn't know that until I looked at this map and I was like, why does Alaska only have one arrow? America's weird. And then last, you got the same problem with this map as with all the others, you got, like, a people-versus-land problem, more generally, each arrow is its size based on percentage, which means that the arrow for Loving county in Texas is the same scale as the arrow for LA county in California, even though Loving county has 96 voters.

Look, all of these things are super useful tools. It would be much harder to understand any of this stuff without these maps and graphs, I'm not arguing that. They are tools meant to simplify and they do a good job, but that can increase the risk that we learn the wrong things from looking at them.

The second thing–I am, I'm very discouraged by this. I decided to make a video about a map today because I felt like I had to do something that, like, referenced the reality of the moment. But I just can't get deeper than that. Like, I don't feel at all qualified to do the analysis, though, I don't know, maybe I'll do some on hankschannel sometime soon. I do feel like there's been a lot of bad takes that are not representative of reality. But I digress. At the moment, I don't have a lot to add here, except that I think the next four years, we're gonna need people to have energy to push back against some of the weirdest and wildest things that the Trump administration’s gonna wanna do. I wrote about this in the special edition of We're Here that I sent out earlier this week. I'll link to it below. But I think the answer to the question “what do we do now?” at the moment is anything you want, like, get out of bed, get outside, go do things that are close. Do things you gotta do. Do things that make you happy. Things where you connect with other people.

The election, I think for a lot of people, I know it was for me, it was long, it was stressful, it was a long fight. It is done now. And at least now, I guess, we know what we're facing. I often respond to situations like this with work. And I did some fun work this week. I made, like, a very dumb tea quiz that helps you pick which tea you might want to get from good.store. If you're relatively new to tea, or even if you're not, I promise that it is silly and that our tea is magnificently good, and also that it's a good present if you're looking at doing that. I'll link also to our gift quiz, which I did not do, but we have one. And 100% of the profit from that goes to fight against tuberculosis and right now, that fight? Looking like it's going to need all the help it can get. So good work doing that, John.

I'll see you on Tuesday.