Some people feel a twinge of jealousy when a work colleague is praised by the boss. Others, when a friend’s TikTok video gets a lot of views. Me? I get jealous when someone does a sharp visualization that I wish I’d thought of.

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       Like this one, from Ohio State’s Thomas Wood.

       It’s elegantly simple: The winner of each state shown by presidential election, with darker shades indicating wider margins. What makes it particularly clever, though, is the arrangement by Census Bureau region, allowing for the quick display of regional patterns in voting.

       There aren’t good photographs for illustrating professional data-visualization jealousy, so I chose a photo of President Lyndon B. Johnson in a pool, regarding some sort of memo. Imagine that I’m LBJ and the memo is Wood’s graph. (To extend the analogy: The dog is my dumb little dog Roger; the kid one of my sons.) “What a chart,” I’m thinking. And: “I’m going to make my own version.”

       So:

       It’s not as punchy as Wood’s, I admit. I chose to depict close elections as gray, muddying the crispness of the patterns shown in the original. I also sorted each region by its 2020 results, making it less easy to find a particular state. But the point is, again, the regional shifts, and those are still present. You can see how the Northeast went from pretty Republican to really Democratic and how the South did the opposite. The hinge point, as you probably know, was the Civil Rights Act of 1964, legislation that spurred a dramatic shift away from the Democrats in the former Confederacy.

       The chart also clearly shows two massive blowout elections: Johnson’s 1964 win and Richard M. Nixon’s eight years later. It disrupts the pattern a bit, these blue and red ribbons, but there’s a way to deal with them. If we consider state results not as the raw margin but as the margin relative to the national margin, things smooth out a bit. In other words, we’d look at the results in Pennsylvania last year not as a one-point Biden win but as a three-point more-Republican result than the country overall. That gives us a chart that looks like this.

       There are still anomalies. In 1964, when Johnson was romping, a number of Southern states backed Barry Goldwater by wide margins in protest, shifting their relative results hard to the right.

       What the relative chart shows is both how robustly Republican many states have become and how some regions, like the Midwest, have remained fairly balanced. We can look at this yet another way, showing the number of times (between zero and 18) that each state was between 50 points more Democratic or 50 points more Republican than the country overall since 1916. Those tall, outlined columns peppering the Midwest are the various times that rounding the margin in those states to the closest multiple of 10 landed it squarely at zero. In the South, by contrast, you see how often states voted far more heavily for the Democrats before 1964.

       Lots of ways to illustrate the evolution of presidential voting. None as good or extensive as Wood’s, sadly. But surely you can empathize with someone creating a better chart than you did. If there’s one universal emotion, it’s that.