While the newspapers and television stations talk about Red States and Blue States, if you think about it for a moment, that's really not how it is. Instead of one state being all red and another all blue, they're just different shades of purple, depending on the percentage of votes for Republicans and Democrats. I was wondering if there was a map to illustrate this, and Rich and ayşe both pointed me to this page on Maps of the 2008 US presidential election results, set up by Mark Newman, from the Department of Physics and Center for the Study of Complex Systems, University of Michigan. Mr. Newman has licensed this work under a Creative Commons License. Thanks for allowing me to share!
Look how pretty (and much more harmonious) it looks:
And if you adjust the map for population rather than geographic size, it looks like this (the rural, more spread out areas tend to be redder than the more bluish cities):
The second one looks like the country on a hallucinogen. Which is what it is for some people.
BUT OBAMA WON!
Posted by: Joel Sax | Nov 08, 2008 at 12:31 PM