"Oh beautiful, for purple states"

Found these maps on a link from Lessig's blog.

If you ignore the 'winner-take-all' distortions of the electoral college and want to get a feel for what sort of "mandate" has really been given to the President, an interesting exercise is to color the US map, county-by-county, on a sliding color scale - 100% kerry is all blue, 100% bush is all red, and a 50% Kerry/50% Bush vote would be colored purple. You get a much clearer picture of how moderate the country is. The link also has maps that adjust the shape of the map to correlate size with population, rather than correlating size with geographic area.

Here's the picture the Bush-ites like to show to demonstrate their "mandate":



And here's the picture with the sliding color scale, showing a much clearer sense of moderation:



An interesting tangent is to be found at this blog, which compares the map of red vs blue states to the map of free vs slave states as of just before the civil war. Guess what - there's a pretty close match. It's probably not fair to draw too many conclusions from that; some places like Kansas had a period around a hundred years ago of pretty impressive social radicalism. But not anymore...

These images are (c) 2004, Michael Gastner, Cosma Shalizi, and Mark Newman, at the University of Michigan, and are used under a Creative Commons license.