Sometimes I worry that, in an effort to describe a complex situation or event in a way that a large number of viewers or readers will quickly understand, the Media (that's Media with a capital M) end up simplifying something so drastically that something important gets lost. I think about this when I see the ongoing discussion about red states and blue states in the wake of the U.S. election.
I suspect America is not so easily compartmentalized and that it's the tough job of responsible media organizations to upset that already comfortable metaphor.
Barak Obama, the great Democrat hope who was elected senator in Illinois, is already trying to do that. He has noted several times since the election that he and George W. Bush shared a million voters. How do we (the Media with a capital M, again) explain the paradox of a voter who can put an X beside Obama's name a few minutes before doing the same beside Bush's name?
Let me start to answer that by referring you to a series of maps which breaks down the red/blue state dichotomy into what might be a more helpful metaphor. These maps break down the voting beyond states, using some techniques geographers use to get a more accurate spatial representation of some data, the data, in this case, being votes cast by people who live in a geographic region.
Looking at the data in a granula form, these topographers find America does indeed have some small bright red chunks and some bright blue chunks, but by and large, America is not so much red and blue as it is purple, an amalgam of those two colours: