This is really fascinating and made me feel a lot better. There have been all these maps all over the media showing the vast red expanse and little strips of blue on the northern coasts. This map is the real story though. Regions are distorted to match area size to population, and shades of purple represent mixed red/blue for areas where the vote was close, most of which show as red on other maps even though the republicans won my a narrow margin. Note that there are many areas that are heavily blue-Democrat and only a very trivial number of areas that are solid red-Republican. I looked them up on the non-baloony version of the map and the one near the top left that looks like a Star Trek Federation badge is Utah, and the vertical line to its right a bit is the vertical strip of South Dakota, Nebraska, Kansas and northwest Texas. The site where you can find this and the other views, and commentary about the statistics, is here: http://www-personal.umich.edu/~mejn/election/. I sure wish our media treated things like this with an approach of helping people understand the data, rather than just spewing misleadingly simplistic facts.