Maps are awesome

Maps, maps, maps. I've loved them as long as I can remember. Not mathematical ones (well, those too :D) but cartographic ones. Maps tell us so much about our world that would otherwise be hard to dig up or to describe in words. But like any representation of reality, maps distend and distort and conceal much even as they reveal. The classic example is, of course, the Mercator projection, in which Greenland is almost the size of Africa (when in fact Greenland is smaller than India, which itself is about one-tenth the size of Africa).

This set of maps from the 2008 US Presidential election shows this quite neatly (and awesomely). 

• The first set of maps look at data at the state level.

1. The first map is a simple state-by-state blue/red coloring (a choropleth, as James Fallows from the Atlantic tells us) that tells you whether a state voted for Obama or McCain. 
2. The second is a population cartogram that rescales the size of the states according to their population, and then colors them red or blue.
3. The third rescales the size of the states according to the number of votes each state gets on the Electoral College (which is largely, but not exactly, correlated with the state's population).

• The next set takes a more fine-grained approach, looking at election results at the county level

1. As with the first map, there is first is a red/blue county-level choropleth.
2. Next, a population cartogram colored with county-level election results

• The final set of maps does away with the red/blue binary distinction (not everybody in a certain state, or even a certain county, voted the same way!) and uses a red-blue spectrum to depict just what the ratio of red votes to blue votes was.

1. As before, a county-level election results choropleth using the red-blue spectrum.
2. And a population cartogram coloring county-level results using the red-blue spectrum.
3. And finally, a county-level election results choropleth and a population cartogram colored using a non-linear red-blue color spectrum that uses solid colors for election results that exceed 70% (because there's presumably not much difference between 70% Democratic communities and 90%).