(I tagged this as politics, but don't let that scare you. It's poltical analysis and it's about as non-partisan as you can get.)
This is a neat site where several ways of drawing the 2008 presidential turnout are displayed. It's interesting to look at the maps and it makes something really clear: it's not so much that the coasts are "blue" and the "heartland" are "red". Instead, the cities are blue and the rural areas are red. For example, look at the southwest in particular and you can really pick out what I think are Las Vegas and Phoenix. Or in Texas you can see El Paso and San Antonio pretty clearly.
(I found the site via Rands's Twitter.)
This is a neat site where several ways of drawing the 2008 presidential turnout are displayed. It's interesting to look at the maps and it makes something really clear: it's not so much that the coasts are "blue" and the "heartland" are "red". Instead, the cities are blue and the rural areas are red. For example, look at the southwest in particular and you can really pick out what I think are Las Vegas and Phoenix. Or in Texas you can see El Paso and San Antonio pretty clearly.
(I found the site via Rands's Twitter.)