An Extremely Detailed Map of the 2020 Election

The New York Times published the most granular election map ever created, showing 2020 presidential results at the precinct level across the entire United States — over 170,000 precincts, each individually colored by margin. The result was a map that revealed political geography at a resolution no previous visualization had achieved.

The piece demonstrated that semantic zoom could make massive datasets navigable: from the national view you see familiar red/blue patterns, but zooming into any city reveals block-by-block political variation invisible in county-level maps. Urban-suburban-rural divides, racial segregation patterns, and college-town effects all become visible.

Technically, it pushed the boundaries of web mapping performance, rendering hundreds of thousands of polygons smoothly in the browser. Editorially, it showed that sometimes the most powerful visualization is simply showing all the data at full resolution and letting the user explore.