Red vs. Blue: The State of the Nation 2008

Images from source

For the last few election cycles, we Americans seem to have settled (or had settled for us) a standardized coloring for states that vote Republican and Democratic. The funny part of course, is that GOP states are now called "red states," something that I'm sure makes some of the more hard-core conservatives bristle.

In 2000 and 2004, the maps were a vast field of red, with some blue around the edges. This spawned several cartoon maps with derogatory names plastered over the red states (all of which were hilarious). But this year, the blue flowed inland, from all directions. This leaves a still contiguous "Red America," but it is much smaller than it used to be. But the still giant size of that red mass is misleading. And when you see the country broken down by county, it looks even redder.

I've heard some conserva-talkers claim that this swollen redness (instead of needing salve), proves that Barack Obama has no mandate. Thankfully, the site excerpted below has put together some helpful maps that show what the country would look like if the population were evenly spread around. Those red states (and counties) can be kinda devoid of people don'tcha know.

[Excerpt]

Maps of the 2008 US presidential election results

The states are colored red or blue to indicate whether a majority of their voters voted for the Republican candidate, John McCain, or the Democratic candidate, Barack Obama, respectively. Looking at this map it gives the impression that the Republicans won the election handily, since there is rather more red on the map than there is blue. In fact, however, the reverse is true – the Democrats won by a substantial margin. The explanation for this apparent paradox, as pointed out by many people, is that the map fails to take account of the population distribution. It fails to allow for the fact that the population of the red states is on average significantly lower than that of the blue ones. The blue may be small in area, but they represent a large number of voters, which is what matters in an election. . .

Read more here.