Cartographic projections of the Results of the 2008 Presidential Election

Mark Newman at the University of Michigan bends a map of the United States to reflect the size of the population in each of its counties — the heavily populated counties expand and the less densely populated ones contract — and then he paints the resulting map with colors ranged along the spectrum from red to blue representing the margin of victory in each country for McCain or Obama respectively. Pure red is for counties that gave at least 70% of their vote to McCain, and pure blue is for counties that went for Obama by 70% or more, with all the purples representing results in between. It's an arresting exercise in trying to visualize what our country's coming to.