Some people argued that we should have used opacity or a dot map to adjust for population density in our 2016 precinct maps. fwiw, here's why we didn't... nytimes.com/interactive/20…
We weren't interested in exploring who got the most votes -- we already know who did. The election was 21 months ago... we felt like we didn't need another tally of the popular vote.
Instead, we wanted to use the 2016 results to make a tool that depicted the contours of American political geography in fine detail, letting people explore the places they care about block by block.
If you want to count who won the most votes, using opacity makes sense. But if you're interested in the political character of a place, reducing the visual weight of low pop places -- literally making them harder to see -- suggests those places aren't worth caring about.
It reinforces the idea that only cities matter. And it misses the point... Because fewer people live in rural Nebraska, does that make it less Republican? Are the reservations in South Dakota less Democratic because they're more sparsely populated?
