I happened to be thinking about the “Bush Country” t-shirts that many conservatives bought in 2004. They were essentially based on this map:
http://www.usatoday.com/news/politicselections/vote2004/countymap.htm
The implication of the t-shirt was the overwhelming amount of red meant that Bush had a mandate from America. Whether you were a supporter or not at the time, there are undeniably two main problems with this map:
1. It automatically colors a county red even if if it was 50.1% to 49.9%.
2. It does not at all account for the population of the individual county.
Anyway, compare this to yesterday when Barack Obama had a decisive electoral win and a substantial popular vote win.
http://www.usatoday.com/news/politics/election2008/results.htm
As you can see, the map is not overwhelmingly different (excepting the Wisconsin/Michigan/Illinois/Iowa area of the midwest) yet the vote went such a vastly different way. I think that the problem is more related to the population distribution than the 50.1%/49.9% problem above.
Anyway, the site I will link below has some good maps of the electoral results of both states and counties and then “bends” them around population bases and blurs the blues and reds into purples to better represent sentiment.
http://www-personal.umich.edu/~mejn/election/2008/
All in all, I guess an “Obama Country” t-shirt would not be that impressive. I guess it is because the Dems lack support in large low population states 