In honor of Hillary Clinton's concession and endorsement today, I've created this animation of the progress of the Democratic presidential primary race:

The map I'm using is a weighted map where the brightness of a county represents the percentage of a delegate vote per square mile on a logarithmic scale and the hue of each county is roughly represented by this scale:

With Edwards being green, Obama being blue, and Clinton being red.

I haven't been able to work on my maps as much as usual, so this is going to be a relatively quick update diary compared to normal, which just two maps: a weighted version that uses the Iowa and Nevada county conventions in place of the caucuses (this makes a big difference for Iowa, not so much for Nevada) and a ratio map, which just includes Clinton's vote in Michigan.  I added Puerto Rico to the weighted map, but not yet to the ratio map.

Color swaps are at the bottom of the diary.  For an explanation of what these maps mean, such as the coloration and brightness, see my last update.

[Update] I do want to be clear that this is a primary map and has nothing to do with the general election race directly.  In the large maps, Clinton is red, Edwards is green, and Obama is blue.  In the color swap maps below, that color code changes.

With just two states left, I decided to make this map update a little different.  One of the major flaws of my past maps has been that it treats all counties equally, when some counties clearly have more voters than others.  So, to give a better idea of where the voters are, I´ve darkened areas where voters are sparse and brightened areas where they are dense (in number, not intellectually).

The result better reflects the actual pattern of voters across the country:

However, there are several caveats, as I will detail below.

This is the color scale:

Red is Clinton, green is Edwards, and blue is Obama.  Normally, I post color swapped versions, but in the interest in posting this more quickly, I'll just direct you to my Flickr photostream and fix this with an update later.

Update: Color swaps are at the bottom of the diary.

One thing I love about EV projections right now is simply the number of states that will be in play come November.  According to this collection of polls and maps (note: ignore the totals - the "Barely" categories are actually statistical ties), there are 10 states right now that are projecting within the margin of error.  Those states are:

Florida - 27
Ohio - 20
Michigan - 17
North Carolina - 15
Virginia - 13
Indiana - 11
Wisconsin - 10
Colorado - 9
South Carolina - 8
Iowa - 7

Eliminating the EV's from these 10 states, you're left with a tally of 226-175 in favor of Obama.  The combinations that put Obama over the top may surprise some.  I've broken them down into the following categories: FL+OH, FL+2, OH+3, and ANY 5.  I explain these below the fold.

a cartogram reminder.

Here is a reminder of what the 2004 electoral map really looked like from the University of Michigan.  In this map, counties are not only shaded from red through many purples to blue, they are also sized based on population.

In his prediction post at FiveThirtyEight.com yesterday, poblano predicted that John Edwards would win a greater amount of the vote in West Virginia because of a specific ballot quirk:  the candidates' hometowns were listed on the ballot.  The prediction was predicated on the idea the some undecided or weakly leaning voters may be swayed by seeing "Chapel Hill, NC" next to "Chicago, IL" and "Chappaqua, NY".

And this prediction turned out to be correct.  John Edwards had the strongest performance that he's had since February 5, when he won 10.2% of the vote in Oklahoma despite suspending his campaign earlier that week.  This time he pulled an impressive 7.3% of the vote three months after suspending his campaign.

Because of this, West Virginia stands out in the map of Edwards' vote percentage compared to the surrounding states:

As promised, here are the maps from the Democratic primary.  Like the commentary I did for the Republican race, this may be a little long and I apologize in advance for that.  If you don't want to read everything, you can scroll through the maps and read the text near the ones you find interesting.

All the color maps here will follow this scale (with some caveats):

In the featured maps, red represents Clinton votes, green represents Edwards votes, and blue represents Obama votes.  The caveat is that many counties are actually slightly darker than anything on this scale because of other votes (Biden, Richardson, Uncommitted, etc.).

To start, here's the map of the primaries so far, updated to include Indiana and North Carolina:

This year's primary season has been an interesting one to say the least.  The media narrative that the Republicans lack a strong candidate while we Democrats have an "inevitable" candidate in Senator Clinton has been turned on its head with the quick rise of Senator McCain after January and the nearly deadlocked race between Senators Obama and Clinton.

As we head into another pair of primaries in Indiana and North Carolina, I thought it would be interesting to look back, but this time at the Republican race, now that it's essentially over.  Though it was a much less exciting race for us, it still shows some interesting trends, so I've put together some maps showing the progress of the Republican race for the presidential nomination.

If you're wondering why I don't yet have something similar up for the Democratic race, don't fret!  I hope to put up something similar this Wednesday or Thursday, after we can take stock of the North Carolina and Indiana results.  I'll also offer some comparison with the Republicans then.

One of the arguments in the Democratic primary is that Hillary Clinton has demonstrated her ability to win the larger states, those states that have the all important electoral college votes that will ultimately decide our next president. With the exception of Illinois, Barack Obama's home state, it has been a clean sweep for her of the largest states.

So, what if the nomination process was based upon the actual election process? That is, assign the number of electoral college votes to the winner in each state.

Using that measure, we have a clear winner: Clinton - 284, Obama - 202, Still Open - 52. (Oops - Hawaii was in error - hard to spot those little states....)

No opinion being offered here - I just thought the map was pretty.

Now that Pennsylvania has voted, it's time to release an update to the primary map.  This time, I don't have many variants, because I decided to switch to a different template for my map, using an SVG graphic as the original template, which can be better resized and allowed me to do away with the boundaries which obscure some of the trends between states.

I think it's pretty clear that Pennsylvania voted in a similar fashion to the surrounding states and that it adds even more clarity to the future contests.

Larger versions of the maps are available on Flickr (just click on the image to get to its Flickr page).  In the above version, blue represent Obama, red represents Clinton, and green represents Edwards.  If you don't like these colors, there are color swapped versions below the fold.

Obama offers Democrats a chance of a once in a generation chance to change the Electoral map.  With the Obama fundraising advantage, conservative distrust of McCain, disenchantment with Republicans in general could Obama virtually run the table?  Is there a chance that Obama could win or make competitive the Rocky Mountain states of North Dakota, South Dakota, Idaho and Montana?  Perhaps win the farm states of Kansas (native state) and Nebraska?  Dare I even say Alaska as the GOP has fallen so out of favor?

In the past few weeks, with no primaries since Mississippi and almost a month until Pennsylvania, the focus of the campaign has been off the horse race and onto campaign bickering through comments made by surrogates, candidates, and their associates as the media attempts to boost ratings by drumming up outrage.

As there have been no new contests, I haven't been able to add any state results to my map of the primaries so far, but that doesn't mean I haven't been able to make some major changes.

Larger versions of all maps in this diary are available by clicking on the map.  The small maps are color swapped versions of the large map above them.  Color swapped versions of the above map and many more are past the jump

As promised, I have updated my map of the primary results by county so far.  The most obvious update is that Mississipi's results are included.  

As well, I used the Vermont Secretary of State data to find the actual Edwards vote there, correcting an estimation I had made earlier.  Like the update of California for the post-Wyoming update, this is not noticeable.

The third update is, as promised, a more detailed look at North Dakota.  

Swapped colors and further explanations after the break

(Here are some really cool maps posted Saturday that are deserving of a wider viewing. Promoted from the diaries. SusanG.)

Since Wyoming doesn't have many counties, this wasn't exactly a big update.  I did modify the coloration of California based on the certified results, which were mostly better for Obama so many of the counties are imperceptibly bluer, though I'm serious when I say imperceptibly.

One thing that I thought was interesting was how well Clinton did toward the southeastern side of Wyoming.  Looking at the pattern, South Dakota may be a bit closer that originally expected.  I will try to figure out the state Congressional districts in North Dakota so that the next update will better show the trends.

Now, I do know that the contests in Michigan and Florida are worth 0 delegates, and I very much agree with the DNC's decision because of the disruptive nature of having two huge states voting early (I'm an Iowan, what can I say?).  However, I do think that the trends in both states are interesting, so I have included the results.  I figure that those looking at the maps already know about the situation, but if people want a version where Florida and Michigan are blackened to signify that no legitimate vote has occured, then I will include a version with that modification in the Post-Mississipi version.

Update:  I will note that the way to look at Michigan is to note how dark the counties are.  The darker they are, the more people voted for Uncomitted (or Kucinich, Dodd, or Gravel).  Many counties in Tennessee are "redder" than any of the counties in Michigan.

Also, if you want bigger versions, just click on the maps and go to the large size on Flickr.

On further note.  I mentioned this in a previous diary with a previous version of this map.  The size of these counties is proportional to their geographic size, not their population or voter turnout size, so there is some skew in how the red or blue some areas look.  One thing to note is that Obama does much better in urban areas.  Look at Nebraska.  There are three congressional districts (that was the most detailed data I could find), which theoretically have the same population, but have vastly different sizes because of the population density difference between Omaha and different areas of the state.  Furthermore, even there, a pro-Obama state which is overrepresented in geographic area, the rural areas were more pro-Clinton than the urban areas.

Tennessee is another example.  Obviously Clinton won that state, but obviously not by as much as the map seems to indicate.  You can actually tell where major cities are by how blue they are against the very strongly red rural regions of Tennessee.

Two weeks ago, I posted a "purple" map of the 2008 Democratic presidential primaries in a my first diary, saying that I would post an updated map after the March 4 primaries.

I've added the results from Vermont, Ohio, Rhode Island, and Texas, as well as recoloring the Hawaii results by county instead of congressional district (thanks Erick for the more detailed results link).  I will also note that the Texas results displayed here are the primary results, not the caucus, which was more in Obama's favor.  I chose to use just the primary results for a few reasons, the main ones being that the caucus results aren't all in yet (the vast majority of the primary results are) and there's no easy way to add the two results together as there were different turnout levels, different weighting, etc. for those two processes

Watching MSNBC and every once in a while they show the map of the United States with the states won by Obama in bright blue and the states won by Clinton in dark blue.

http://www.democraticunderground.com...

The above post is a link to a great map prepared by the New York Times that shows each county won by Obama vs. Clinton.  It adds real meaning to the geography, showing for instance that Obama won the populated areas of Northern Calif. while Clinton won southern Calif (which are more Latino).

If you are anything like me and need to know how any given election will turn out well before the AP and cable news outfits officially project a winner, the following information might be helpful as you watch the early Wisconsin returns tonight.