What might a U.S. divorce look like?

Yesterday, I posted an article (which has been updated to today due to a dispute over an article I linked to) advocating dissolution of the United states according to political preferences expressed in the 2004 presidential election, when, as I wrote, we had the opportunity to toss out George W. Bush–and didn’t. I believe this makes sense because political preferences often reflect social and cultural attitudes. These have important impacts on attitudes about, for instance, abortion, universal health care, economic regulation, environmental and social responsibility, personal freedom, and civil rights.

The map I posted yesterday was a cartogram put together by some folks at the University of Michigan. The map I’m posting today is based on that map, and where that map showed too much nuance to be workable, this map perhaps shows too little. I’ll emphasize again that I’m not prescribing how the areas I’m classifying as red should divide themselves.

Likewise, I don’t think the areas I’m classifying as blue should all unite. I have tried to divide up the shades of red, purple, and blue into just red and blue, leading to a little more territorial contiguity. Hopefully, the effects of any weaknesses in my color perception are minimal (I passed an on line color blindness test). There might still be dislocations in a final arrangement, but certainly no worse than what the United States and Israel are brutally demanding of Palestinians. So here it is:

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And here again is the cartogram from yesterday:

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