Election history and state ordering

I was talking on Bluesky about why I dislike the widespread use of alphabetical ordering for states on the y-axis of charts. There are better ways! My favorite is detailed in this notebook, where I talk through some methods for treating paths. I have an interactive tool for building out paths like this one, which is a decent way to order all the countries in the world for data visualization.

I realized after posting that I should check some of the old 19th century census atlases I wrote about for Creating Data; and indeed, Henry Gannett did use a nice linear ordering for representing states in the rare cases that he couldn’t use bars arranged by frequencies. These are grouped by what we’d now call (but I don’t think were in 1890) “census regions.” But there are some ugly transitions, like the jump from Florida to Ohio. (You can see the full image at the Library of Congress.)

My preferred ordering, below, snakes from Hawaii to Maine in an order that respects census regions; almost all the state jumps are continguous, and where they aren’t (like the jump from Florida to South Carolina) they’re close.

["Pacific Ocean","Guam","GU","Hawaii","HI","Alaska",
"AK","Lower 48","West","West Coast","Pacific Northwest",
"WA","Washington","OR","Oregon","CA","California","Southwest",
"AZ","Arizona","NM","New Mexico","NV","Nevada","CO",
"Colorado","WY","Wyoming","UT","Utah","ID","Idaho","MT",
"Montana","Midwest","Dakotas","ND","North Dakota","SD",
"South Dakota","NE","Nebraska","KS","Kansas","IA","Iowa",
"MN","Minnesota","WI","Wisconsin","MI","Michigan","OH",
"Ohio","IN","Indiana","IL","Illinois","South","MO",
"Missouri","OK","Oklahoma","TX","Texas","LA","Louisiana",
"AR","Arkansas","KY","Kentucky","TN","Tennessee","MS",
"Mississippi","AL","Alabama","GA","Georgia","FL","Florida",
"SC","South Carolina","NC","North Carolina","WV",
"West Virginia","VA","Virginia","Northeast","Mid-Atlantic",
"DC","MD","Maryland","DE","Delaware","PA","Pennsylvania",
"NJ","New Jersey","NY","New York","New England",
"Southern New England","CT","Connecticut","RI",
"Rhode Island","MA","Massachusetts","Northern New England",
"NH","New Hampshire","VT","Vermont","ME","Maine",
"Carribean","Puerto Rico","PR","US Virgin Islands"]

My favorite example of this layout shows changes in political polarization in the United states by election. The Democratic “solid south” from 1880 to 1964 is clearly present: and the newer Republican solid regions in the intermountain west and northern great plains, as well as smaller phenomena like Bill Clinton’s two-time carve out of Louisiana, Arkansas, Tennessee, and Kentucky.

In this chart states are colored by their lean relative to the country; this smooths out the general year-to-year swings where Biden does better than Clinton does worse than Obama to show the overall geography. The story of the 2024 election in this view is that the two great Republican regions are chipping away at the holdouts in the middle: Iowa and Ohio flipped from swingy to solid red in 2016, and Wisconsin/Michigan/Minnesota have continued to shift slightly more towards the middle.

Here, by contrast, is the same visualization ordered alphabetically. There is nothing to see.

For an interactive version of this chart, see here to be able to toggle between the two orders and see simply the winner.