There’s been a lot of talk about how Obama “swept” the election, and “recol­ored the elec­toral map”. It’s true he did well in the elec­toral college con­fig­u­ra­tion. The elec­toral college dom­i­nates our picture of US elec­tions because, strate­gi­cally, it’s the only thing that counts. But it’s mean­ing­less as a measure of people’s polit­ical values, except as a very dim sur­ro­gate of actual vote tallies.

The elec­toral college system typ­i­cally has the effect of mag­ni­fying small dif­fer­ences, as is the case this time around. How much did Obama really win by? Around 6%. Granted, US pres­i­den­tial races are his­tor­i­cally tight; Reagan’s 1980 “land­slide” was less than 10%. But before we decide that we’re a changed nation it’s worth con­sid­ering that out of every 20 voters, 11 chose Obama and 9 chose McCain. That’s very, very close.

As for the “recol­oring of the map”, well, not really. True, states which voted for Bush one or both of the last elec­tions went to Obama, but there wasn’t much change in the state-​​level popular vote either. Here’s Andrew Gelman’s analysis:

In sum: whatever the democrat:republican ratio was for a given state last time is pretty much what it was this time. Except for Hawaii. Go Hawaii!

Mark Newman was up through the night of the 4^th cranking out fresh versions of his now-​​famous linearly-​​coloured and car­togram maps of the election results.

The full-​​on car­tograms are con­fusing, so let’s look just at the shades-​​of-​​purple maps. Here’s what the election looked like (by county) two days ago:

and 4 years and a billion dollars in cam­paigning ago:

He’s removed outlines from his polygons, for which I give him 2 extra marks on his map. But oth­er­wise the dif­fer­ences are subtle.

I don’t mean to be a buzzkill, and if you read more of Andrew Gelman’s stuff it looks like there really were some inter­esting demo­graphic shifts. But Obama got on to some pretty lofty rhetoric there, and some of dialogue around his possible pres­i­dency and what it meant for America got pretty loft in response. We’re still in the same country here.

It’s also worth noting that despite promising trans­for­ma­tive change for the better, Obama’s pres­i­dency is likely to be more about nav­i­gating bad change (pending world-​​wide reces­sion), pre-​​empting future bad change (global climate, uh, change) and cleaning up bad change from admin­is­tra­tions past. And he’ll have to do it with reduced resources and reduced inter­na­tional trust. Which is one of the reasons I’m glad that the subtle shifts in polit­ical values the country has gone through tipped things the way they did. I suspect Obama may be just about the right guy for the careful, gentle, dis­ci­plined, undra­matic pres­i­dency his bom­bastic campaign poetry signed him up for.