Append more variables to a SpatialPolygonsDataFrame using R

Question

I would like to generate a SpatialPolygonsDataFrame that I can use to plot a cartogram whose polygons are proportional to a variable.

A clear example is how FiveThirtyEight created a hex cartogram with each US state made up of hex polygons equating to the number of electoral college seats they have. The data they use is straight forward, US geodata + electoral college distribution by state + state names. The outcome is here: https://projects.fivethirtyeight.com/2016-election-forecast/#electoral-map

I tried to reproduce the cartogram using the code below but can't quite get some aspect of the initial object: Specifically, how do I merge the electoral college data with the US geodata so that I have 538 observations? All reproductions I have seen start off from a ready SpatialPolygonsDataFrame object file from FiveThirtyEight.

Below is my work so far, trying to merge the two objects but ending up with a dataframe without the polygons (50 rows instead of 538).

Get US state level shapefile from GADM:

us_states <- raster::getData("GADM", country = "United States", level = 1)

us_states

class       : SpatialPolygonsDataFrame 
features    : 51 
extent      : -179.1506, 179.7734, 18.90986, 72.6875  (xmin, xmax, ymin, ymax)
crs         : +proj=longlat +datum=WGS84 
variables   : 10

Get electoral_college from https://worldpopulationreview.com/state-rankings/electoral-votes-by-state

electoral_college <- read.csv("./ecollege.csv")

Merge the two:

geocoll <- merge(x=us_states, y=electoral_college, by.x="NAME_1", by.y="State")

This results in a df (geocoll) without the polygons. Ideally, I would want x polygons (hex, circles or squares) for a state. 55 for California, for example.

Answer 1

Pretty close! You need to make use of sp::merge() instead of merge from base R in order to get a SpatialPolygonsDataFrame instead of a data frame without geometry information.

library(raster)
library(sp)

us_states <- raster::getData("GADM", country = "United States", level = 1)

electoral_college <- read.csv("ecollege.csv")

geocoll <- sp::merge(x = us_states, 
                     y = electoral_college, 
                     by.x = "NAME_1", 
                     by.y = "State")

class(geocoll)
#> [1] "SpatialPolygonsDataFrame"
#> attr(,"package")
#> [1] "sp"

head(geocoll)
#>       NAME_1 GID_0        NAME_0   GID_1 VARNAME_1 NL_NAME_1 TYPE_1 ENGTYPE_1
#> 1    Alabama   USA United States USA.1_1   AL|Ala.      <NA>  State     State
#> 2     Alaska   USA United States USA.2_1 AK|Alaska      <NA>  State     State
#> 3    Arizona   USA United States USA.3_1  AZ|Ariz.      <NA>  State     State
#> 4   Arkansas   USA United States USA.4_1   AR|Ark.      <NA>  State     State
#> 5 California   USA United States USA.5_1 CA|Calif.      <NA>  State     State
#> 6   Colorado   USA United States USA.6_1  CO|Colo.      <NA>  State     State
#>   CC_1 HASC_1 electoralVotesNumber peoplePerElector      Pop
#> 1 <NA>  US.AL                    9         563687.4  5073187
#> 2 <NA>  US.AK                    3         246007.7   738023
#> 3 <NA>  US.AZ                   11         663945.3  7303398
#> 4 <NA>  US.AR                    6         505107.7  3030646
#> 5 <NA>  US.CA                   55         727183.2 39995077
#> 6 <NA>  US.CO                    9         658068.7  5922618