I was shocked yesterday to see the maps showing which counties went for Bush and which for Kerry. The conclusion from that image is that only the cities are blue; the rest of the country is red.
But Robert Vanderbei, a professor of operations research and financial engineering at Princeton, has produced a powerful corrective. His map colours counties on the actual percentage vote, so there’s a spectrum of results from red to blue, with various shades of purple in between. The real picture is that the US is a purple country just about everywhere (via Crooked Timber).