Red vs. Blue

We've all see the standard maps of the latest presidential election that show a very "red" country with fringes of "blue" in the northeast and along the west coast. The implication being that only a few heavily populated democratic states voted for Kerry and that the rest of the nation was solidly for Bush.

Michael Gastner, Cosma Shalizi, and Mark Newman of the University of Michigan have produced some interesting maps that show that the actual breakdown, once you look past the winner-take-all results of the electoral college, are actually more complex and interesting and that the geographical political divisions are not so apparent.

There results can be found at Maps and cartograms of the 2004 US presidential election results