A few years ago I took a day-long seminar from the guru of information design, Edward Tufte. That course includes copies of his three books, which contain numerous wonderful examples of the principles he talks about, including the anti-USA Today idea that complexity is not necessarily a bad thing. Of course, this is because I'm Metro, not Retro, and believe that the world is a complex place rather than the black and white (or, in this case, red and blue) world of that mindset. As soon as someone took the color-coded electoral map (found via boing boing and NowThis) and attempted to show that the U.S. isn't split, but more purple, I immediately thought that the granularity of the state divisions was much too large, and you needed this kind of visualization on the county (or, even better, precinct level).

Princeton professor Robert J. Vanderbei steps up to the plate with a lovely example of what I was thinking of. In fact, he went one better and even had the blue and red combining with a faint tinge of green for places that actually voted for other candidates.

(He even has a larger image, if you want to see some of those counties a little better.)

What was surprising to me is not that it revealed the tyranny of rural America over urban areas (which are actually not quite as blue as one might think, due to the rednecks of suburbia), but that there are some rural areas that are much more blue than one would have expected. Namely, take a glance at the southern border of Texas, an economically depressed area that has been suffering the policies of Bush for much longer than most of us. And how about that Colorado-Wyoming area? Who are those blue bloods? Is that Denver?