Purple haze

There have been numerous election maps produced in the last few days, but I find this one particularly consoling as it shows how close it really was. The purple represents a 50/50 spilt:

The creator Jeff Culver told Boing Boing:

"I was thinking today about how the 'red v. blue' states graphic is really misleading considering the slim margins that the candidates won some of those states by, so I sat down and created the map. I think it definitely portrays our fellow states far differently than the extreme way we've been seeing to date."

The bottom line is that rural counties voted Bush and cities voted Kerry. Rural areas have a much lower population density, but occupy a larger geographic range. Looking at a standard election map, the Republican red looks like a Bush landslide, but the actual population counts were almost dead even: half the country for Bush, the other half for Kerry.

Other maps:
+ Robert J. Vanderbei's county-by-country Purple America map
+ USA Today's county-by-county map
+ USA Today's state-by-state standard map

Other links today:
+ The National Priorities Project has published a visual state by state tool contrasting each US state's share of the cost of the war in Iraq with the cost of other programs such as education or homeland security. See how the war has affected your community. Sample figures: California ($19.5B), Texas ($11.5B), Ohio ($5.7B).