2067

This is one of the worst political maps I've ever seen. Randall is mapping multiple variables onto the same aesthetic, which goes against the grammar of graphics. The size of each name indicates both the "height" of the office (what does that mean, anyway? is a Senator "higher" than a Governor?) and the challenger's chance of winning, so there's a serious confounding issue there-- in Montana, is Matt Rosendale bigger than Kathleen Williams because the Senate is "higher" than the House, or because he has a better chance of winning? Also, no scale is provided, so it's impossible to tell relatively how likely any of these people are to win in the first place. I guess the intended take-home message is supposed to be that the Democrats are going to clean up on Tuesday, since there are a lot more big blue names than big red ones, but then you have to remember that all those blue names are challenging red ones to begin with. When you consider that every one of those Democratic names is running for a seat currently held by a Republican, the Democratic Party is actually doing worse than I thought.

Consider, too, Randall's condescending disdain for people who actually care about sports. He knows that caring about sports is dumb, because it's just an atavistic urge toward tribal solidarity expressing itself in an incredibly lower-class way. All that endless talk about how teams stack up against each other is such a huge waste of time; the outcome of the game will be decided by the players when they play, and it won't matter after the game anyway. For all these reasons, real intellectuals know that sports are stupid, and that you should care about more important things like who's going to win legislature seats in a state you'll never visit.