Land Does Not Vote by Ansgar Wolsing

This animation shows the party affiliation of the elected candidates in the 2022 U.S. House of Representatives Election.

It starts with a choropleth map with each congressional district in its natural geographical size and shape colored by the party of the successful candidate - blue for Democrats and red for Republicans. The higher the vote share of the winning candidate, the darker the color. The natural shapes are then morphed into equally sized hexagons.

The transformation underscores the distorted perception choropleth maps can create when visualizing areas with vastly different sizes - ranging from 10 square miles (NY-12) to 665 million square miles (Alaska-at-large). The hexagonal representation corrects this by ensuring each district appears equal in size, reflecting the one representative per district principle.

The visualization was created with data from census.gov and a hexagonal shapefile from Daily Kos (https://dkel.ec/map). It serves as both an informative election map and a commentary on cartographic bias in political visualizations.