Maps and Hoaxes

There's an e-mail circulating that features the above map. It purports that a Professor Joseph Olson has done a study that indicates that Republicans won large numbers of counties and a greater number of states but that in the end the higher population areas and areas where people are on the Federal dole essentially carried the election for Barry O. This is a hoax.


The map shown here, however, is not a hoax. This is the representation of the election on a county by county basis. Clearly, if the election were based on land mass, John McCain would be sitting in the White House right now. But, when we put that map into a cartogram, as the good folks at the University of Michigan have done, we get the following:
A cartogram adjusts the scale to reflect the population of the state. So Rhode Island, in effect, becomes bigger than Wyoming. What all of this illustrates is that we are living in a divided country with the coastal regions going one way and the central core going another and that the real race is on the margins, those areas between the two that will continue to swing elections. Places like Pennsylvania and Ohio, Colorado and central Florida. Purple is the new battleground for the hearts and minds of Americans.