Making Maps is Fun!

Over the weekend, I happened across a list of cities. After a few seconds, I noticed something odd about them: the areas comprising the list were overwhelmingly Blue, not Red. Here’s a map in which the states containing the cities on the aforementioned list are color-coded based on how their cities voted (click to enlarge):

Due to limitations of my mapping software, Yellow is standing in for Red. That is, Yellow represents a Bush state, Blue a Kerry State, and the various green hues are states whose category is ambiguous under my city-based metric (i.e., these states contain multiple cities from the list). Grey states did not contain any cities on the list.

Clearly, within the areas I was looking at, Bush did rather poorly, taking only three states out of a bit more than twenty. So here’s the question: What anti-American list of cities must I have been looking at to find such weak and narrow support for the president?

AB

P.S. Yes, this is a bit silly, but it’s much less so than arguing that, say, winning the ‘most votes ever’ proves a mandate (the population is growing!) or that a map showing big red swatches of land (where few people live) proves a mandate.

P.P.S. Click here for more interesting maps.