Well, for those of you out there who are still in mourning after the results of the election and the conservatism sweeping the United States, I offer a measure of hope for you in the form of a different perspective.
Nearly everyone has seen the political maps plastered about the news media; the blue "bastions of sanity" (as one of my friends put it) swimming in a sea of stalwart red states. No doubt those maps have proven it quite difficult to believe the election was all that close at all, and all the more disheartening. However, several people from the University of Michigan sat down and put a little more thought into it than the button pushers at Fox News. They found that the simple political map was proving to be an entirely inefficient method of displaying the electoral results, and offered a superior method of communicating our democracy in a much more fair handed manner.
Mark Newman and the rest of his compatriots took a cue from Robert Vanderbei over at Princeton University, and developed a cartogram basing the geographical size of a state on its population. This creates a map that is much more in line with the polls rather than the archaic electoral college. Cartograms also counter the massively discouraging county-based electoral map such as that produced by USA Today. By applying the same kind of population based algorithms you can see the ugly puke-colored distortion that is our nation.
And remember, if that deformed image doesn't warm your heart, you can always get your political maps from the Daily Show.
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