Many more revealing maps at
http://www.cscs.umich.edu/~crshalizi/election/

They've got all kinds of variations on blue-red vs. purple, states vs. counties, and cartogram vs. not.

As one of the 45% who didn't vote for the winning candidate in his state, I wholeheartedly concur. Heck, 40% of us didn't even vote for the winner in our COUNTY, so let's throw that map out too while we're at it.

Not that there's necessarily anything wrong with using a choropleth map to display election results. It's been used for decades, and for decades we seemed capable of understanding that it was simply a graphical representation of who won each state, nothing more. Somehow in the last four years it got transformed into the idea that there are two homogeneous, opposite cultures that begin and end at the state lines.

Purple - the color of Barney the dinosaur and the title of a BAD Oprah Winfrey movie.

Nuff said.

"...he title of a BAD Oprah Winfrey movie."

Are you implying that there exists a good Oprah Winfrey movie? The very phrase "Oprah Winfrey movie"...