As we are all aware the presidential election is less than a month away. Accompanying this year’s election season are all the wonderful online maps that have been created to give depth to the progress of the campaigns and to visualize poll and election data. This is the first part of a multipart series exploring the myriad of presidential election online maps.

This series of posts will highlight the breadth of online political tracking creations. The focus will be on the content, interactivity and information presented. As well, since the web page is the medium of the web, this will focus on the overall presentation of content, supporting material and available links and connections.

So lets cut to the chase and start looking at the 2008 political map offerings with Google Elections ‘08 Map Gallery as the first.

Google Elections ‘08 Map Gallery

I have decided to kick this off with a series of maps from Google. As we are all familiar with Google maps, I figured this would be a great place to start this series. The Google Elections ‘08 Map Gallery is actually not one map but multiple maps created using the Google maps engine. These maps cover a range of topics, from senate races to historical maps of candidates as they traveled the road to the white house. I am not going to go into great coverage on all of them as you can explore the ones I don’t mention. Feel free to leave comments about your favorites in the comments below.

The map I was initially looking for was the standard poll map (embedded above), based on polls who is winning the election and what states. Of course this is one of the offerings in the gallery. The cool thing about this map is that it is highly interactive and it lets you change state candidate voting to see differing outcomes based on the viewers’ perceived vote trends. As well as the interactivity is the ability to view several different poll projections on the map. The map provides the ability to view polls from cnn, MSNBC, New York Times and so on. Besides differing poll results, you can also view the state votes from past elections all the way back to 1932 Roosevelt Vs Hoover.

The web page is relatively a no frills experience. There are the distributed number counts at the bottom of the page, but there really is nothing more than the map itself with allot of data and information that can be gleaned.

One of the newer offerings is an interesting mixture of media and mapping displaying campaign speech locations with embedded videos for each location. There are two available, one for each candidate (Obama Video Map embedded above). I love this mixture of mapping technology with media as it fleshes out the geographic location of the speeches and ties both content together into a cohesive package.

You can check this collection yourself at Google Elections ‘08 Map Gallery. As mentioned above please feel free to leave me your thoughts on this first selection and\or comments about the maps in the gallery. Please check back as I will be adding additional content to this series soon.