Artist and urban planner Neil Freeman has been redrawing the United States for years. His “Electoral College Reform Map” imagined 50 states with equal population, where a vote in Mendocino counts the same as a vote in Muskogee. Last month, he released “Random States of America,” a bonkers tool that generates a new electoral map each time you click, mashing up actual voting results with arbitrary state borders. On some maps, Hillary Clinton wins with 320 electors; on others, she loses with 220. Randomness reigns. If you need further persuasion that we should elect a president by national popular vote, you’ll find it here.
But let’s not get too far from reality. I reached out to Freeman and asked him to calculate who would win the 2016 election if the states were redrawn under plausible scenarios. Call it the Random-But-Realistic-(Hey-This-Kinda-Makes-Sense!) States of America. For inspiration, we looked at maps that use big data like phone calls and commute flows to draw state borders that reflect the way Americans live today.
Here are the electoral colleges that could have been.
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