Look at the screen on election night. It’s a sea of red. Huge swaths of the Midwest, the Great Plains, and the South look like a solid crimson block, making it seem like the country is overwhelmingly conservative. Then you see these tiny, isolated dots of deep blue—mostly hugging the coasts or huddling around big cities like Chicago or Atlanta. If you just glanced at a blue and red states map, you’d swear the "red" side won by a landslide every single time.
But maps don't vote. People do.
That’s the biggest trick of the modern political map. It treats empty land with the same visual weight as a high-rise in Manhattan or a suburb in Phoenix. We’ve become obsessed with this binary, color-coded vision of America, but the reality is way messier, way more "purple," and honestly, way more interesting than a simple two-tone graphic suggests.
The weird history of the blue and red states map
You probably think we’ve always used blue for Democrats and red for Republicans. Nope. It’s actually a fairly recent habit that stuck purely by accident. Before the 2000 election between George W. Bush and Al Gore, there was no set standard. Some networks used red for Democrats because of the "left-wing" association with the color in Europe, while others used blue.
During the 1976 election, NBC’s first lighted map actually used blue for Republicans and red for Democrats. Then came the marathon 2000 election. Because the Florida recount dragged on for weeks, the imagery of that specific map—where the New York Times and USA Today happened to use red for the GOP—became burned into the collective American psyche.
We just stopped changing it. Now, it's our political shorthand.
It’s kind of wild when you think about it. We’ve built entire cultural identities—"Blue State Liberal" or "Red State Conservative"—around a color scheme that was basically a coin toss by a graphic designer twenty-five years ago.
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The problem with "Winner-Take-All" visuals
The standard blue and red states map you see on CNN or Fox News is a choropleth map. That’s a fancy way of saying it colors an entire geographic area based on a single data point. In this case, if a candidate wins 50.1% of the vote in a state, the whole state turns that color.
This creates a massive visual distortion.
Take a state like Pennsylvania or Michigan. In 2016 and 2020, these states were decided by razor-thin margins—sometimes less than one percentage point. Yet, on the map, they appear as a solid, monolithic block of color. It completely erases the millions of people who voted the other way. If you live in a "blue" state like California but you're a staunch conservative in Kern County, the map basically says you don't exist. Same goes for a liberal in Austin, Texas.
Geographic size is the other liar.
Montana is huge. It’s roughly 147,000 square miles. Rhode Island is tiny, about 1,200 square miles. On a standard map, Montana’s "red" footprint is over 100 times larger than Rhode Island’s "blue" footprint, even though Rhode Island actually has more people living in it. This is why "land doesn't vote" has become such a common refrain among political scientists like Kenneth C. Martis, who has spent decades studying how we visualize elections.
Moving beyond the binary: The "Purple" reality
If we really wanted an accurate blue and red states map, we’d use shades of purple. Most of America isn't deep indigo or bright scarlet. It’s a gradient.
Even in the reddest states, like Wyoming, about 26% of people voted for Joe Biden in 2020. In the bluest states, like Vermont, Donald Trump still pulled about 30% of the vote. When you look at a county-level map that uses a gradient—showing how "red" or "blue" a place actually is—the harsh borders start to bleed into each other. You start to see that the divide isn't really between states; it's between high-density urban centers and low-density rural areas.
It’s an urban-rural split, not a state-versus-state war.
Why the "Cartogram" is a better tool
Data scientists like Mark Newman from the University of Michigan have tried to fix this by creating cartograms. These are those "bumpy" or "distorted" maps where the size of a state is scaled based on its population rather than its physical landmass.
When you look at a population-weighted map:
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- New Jersey expands to look like a giant.
- The massive rectangular states in the West shrink down to slivers.
- The "sea of red" suddenly looks like a series of thin veins, while the blue areas expand into massive hubs.
It’s not as pretty to look at. It looks a bit like a balloon animal that’s been stepped on. But it’s a much more honest representation of where the power lies in the Electoral College.
The psychological impact of the map
There's a real-world cost to these maps. They fuel polarization. When we look at a blue and red states map, we fall into "us versus them" thinking. We start to believe that everyone in a red state thinks one way and everyone in a blue state thinks another.
This leads to "geographic sorting." People are increasingly moving to places that match their political "color." If you’re a liberal in a red state, you might feel isolated and decide to move to a blue hub. This reinforces the map’s colors and makes districts even less competitive. It creates echo chambers where we don't even talk to people who disagree with us anymore because we’ve physically and visually partitioned the country.
How to actually read an election map like a pro
Next time an election rolls around and the graphics start flashing, don't take the colors at face value. You've got to look deeper.
First, check the "swing" counties. Places like Erie County, Pennsylvania, or Door County, Wisconsin. These are the "bellwether" spots that actually tell you where the wind is blowing. They often flip between red and blue, and they represent the moderate middle that the big state-wide maps ignore.
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Second, ignore the early "red mirage" or "blue shift." Because of how different states count mail-in ballots versus in-person votes, a map might look bright red at 8:00 PM and then slowly turn blue by 2:00 AM. This isn't "fraud"—it's just the order of operations. Rural areas (usually red) often report faster because they have fewer ballots to count. Big cities (usually blue) take forever because they're processing millions of votes.
Practical insights for the curious voter
If you want to understand the true political landscape without the distortion, stop looking at the big wall-to-wall maps and try these steps instead:
- Use "Shaded" Maps: Look for interactive maps that show the "margin of victory" rather than just the winner. A state won by 2% should look light pink or light blue, not dark red or navy.
- Follow the "Trend" lines: Don't just look at who won a state; look at whether they won it by more or less than the last time. A red state that is becoming "less red" over three election cycles is a bigger story than a blue state staying blue.
- Check the "Bubbles": Some outlets use bubble maps where the size of the circle represents the number of votes cast. This is the best way to see how a tiny geographic dot like Chicago actually carries more weight than the entire rest of the state of Illinois.
- Look at the "Suburban Shift": The real battle isn't in the inner cities or the deep farm country. It's in the "donut" counties around major cities. These are the areas that are currently shifting the most and are the reason the blue and red states map is constantly in flux.
The map is a tool, but it's also a simplification. America is a messy, sprawling, 50-shade-of-purple country that doesn't fit neatly into a two-color box. The sooner we stop treating the map like a sports scoreboard, the better we'll understand the people living inside those borders.
To get a more nuanced view of your own area, go to your local Secretary of State website after an election and look at the precinct-level data. You’ll likely find that even your "solid" neighborhood is more diverse in opinion than any national map would ever lead you to believe.