I saw that map on twitter and found it very intriguing. It certainly shows that our “red-blue divide” is a little bit more complicated than people like to believe. The NY Times’ Jamelle Bouie liked it too and wrote this in his newsletter:
I am a big fan of maps, and the best I’ve seen this year comes from Randall Munroe of the web comic “XKCD.” It is a map of the 2020 presidential election results, but not the traditional blue/red Electoral College map, nor is it a county-level map of the United States or even a map that weights the size of each state by its population. Instead, it simply shows where the votes were.
The goal of the map, Munroe says, is to show where voters are. “My map isn’t great for telling at a glance who won a given state,” he explained on Twitter, but it will help answer a “basic question like ‘Where do most Trump voters in Illinois live?’” To that end, each red or blue figure on the map represents 250,000 votes, and they are placed in a way to show where each cluster is located within each state. There are obviously some voters in the white space of the map, but they are few and far between.
I think this way of representing votes makes Munroe’s map still infinitely more useful than the typical election-result map. First of all, it illustrates the basic truth that few people live in the interior of the country, something even the most detailed red/blue maps tend to obscure.
Second of all, Munroe’s illustration of the results shows how talk of secession — of “red states” and “blue states” going their separate ways — is deeply misguided. Every state, every city, every county, every community has Trump voters and Biden voters. Even in my strongly pro-Biden enclave of Charlottesville, Va., thousands of my neighbors voted for President Trump. As Munroe says, ”You can be a Biden voter in a Trump household in a Biden precinct in a Trump county in a Biden district in a Trump state in a Biden country.” Traditional maps leave the false (and dangerous) impression that we are a nation of rival, sorted, easily definable camps. In truth, however, the political geography of the United States is layered, and there’s no easy way to divide the country into partisan camps.
The thing is, those people aren’t going away (the reverse is also true, for those conservatives who feel similarly about left-leaning Americans). There will be no split. As Munroe’s map shows, we are bound to each other, whether we like it or not. The challenge for the next decade, then, is how do we live together, and more important, how do we govern when even living together is such a challenge?
Our division isn’t really regional, obviously. It’s just that the electoral college gives and edge to places where fewer people live and in those states the national minority has an edge. Get rid of the electoral college and you have a government that’s much more reflective of the national majority.
Think about this for a moment and contemplate just how absurd our system really is:
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