Ari Melber, December 2, 2004

When the 2004 Presidential Campaign finally ended, the media presented maps of the United States with this year’s red and blue states.

Republicans gloated about the huge red areas, Democrats pointed to the big blue cities, and pundits marveled that most of the country was completely divided between Republican and Democrat, conservative and liberal, and of course, red and blue.

There is one problem with this picture. It’s wrong.

The red and blue map is binary, and our elections are not. The map treats all states the same: total blowouts look just like states that were won by a single percentage point. In reality, a few points -- or tens of thousands of people -- decided the outcome in many states. These states are not really red or blue; they are closer to purple.

If you allocate red and blue according to Republican and Democratic turnout by county, you get a lot of purple. That’s what Princeton Mathematics Professor Robert J. Vanderbei did. He calls his map "Purple America," and it shows exactly how close the 2004 Election was across most of the United States.

The map reveals purple stretching across the heartland, urban blue dots in George Bush’s Texas, and crimson, rural counties in California, the mother of all blue states. It depicts an America that is more dispersed than divided. This is very different than the divided America that the media presented on November 3rd. It’s different than the map most politicians envision, because they are always looking for their party’s emerging majority. But it is the American we live in.

This real, purple America is the one that Barack Obama described in his famous speech at the 2004 Democratic National Convention. He criticized the pundits who "like to slice-and-dice our country into Red States and Blue States, " and declared, "We worship an awesome God in the Blue States, and we don’t like federal agents poking around our libraries in the Red States." He was saying, in other words, that there is red and blue in every state. That resonated with a lot of people who were tired of red vs. blue simplification.

Of course, most politicians will continue to describe America in one color, as they visualize the growth of their party. And the media will continue to exaggerate the simple contrasts on their two-toned maps. But the fact remains, you can’t paint America with two brushes and expect an accurate picture.

Ari Melber, a former Legislative Aide in the U.S. Senate, is a contributor to "50 Ways to Love Your Country."

Copyright © 2004 Ari Melber