It was a portrait of the country on election night, but on Twitter, it was also a Rorschach test.
Conservatives replying to Yingst's tweet interpreted the expanse of red as proof of their party's dominance throughout all levels of government. Liberals viewed the map as a distortion, masking the fact that most of that redness covers sparsely populated land, with relatively few voters.
In reality, both sides are right, says Ken Field. A self-proclaimed "cartonerd," Field is a product engineer at the mapping software company Esri and author of a guidebook for mapmakers called Cartography. The problem, he says, isn't with people's partisan interpretation of the map. The problem is believing that any single map can ever tell the whole story. "People see maps of any type, and particularly election maps, as the result, the outcome, but there are so many different types of maps available that can portray results in shades of the truth," Field says. "It's a question of the level of detail that people are interested in understanding."
It stands to reason that President Trump would want that particular map hung in the West Wing. There is an awful lot of red on it. But focusing on that map alone could lead Republicans to overestimate their advantage, and lead Democrats to misunderstand the best ways to catch up. That's one reason why Field recently published an extensive gallery of more than 30 alternative maps designed to tell markedly different stories about what happened on election night 2016. (Well, that and he just really loves maps.)
"All of these maps show different versions of the truth," he says. "None are right, and none are wrong, but they all allow you to interpret the results differently."
An interactive view from above:
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Issie Lapowsky is a senior writer for WIRED, covering politics and national affairs.
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