Democrat-Blue Highways Through Red America: A Road-Trip Game
I wondered: Where could I drive for a whole day (or two) without passing through a single precinct won by Donald Trump in 2020?
I’ve always liked maps. As a little kid I loved gas-station state maps and giant atlases, then United States Geological Survey topographical maps and Michelin maps of Europe (and Tolkien’s map of Middle-earth) when I discovered those. As an adult I always look at maps in antique shops and flea markets, and love plotting Google maps. I was excited to learn earlier this month about the four-color map theorem — that by using four different colors, a mapmaker can create a map containing an unlimited number of regions with no adjacent regions in the same color.
I’m also interested in politics, so in this golden age of digital infographics I’ve spent a lot of time geeking out over the New York Times’ super-granular interactive “Extremely Detailed Map of the 2020 Election” (as I had their 2016 version), which shows the Republican and Democratic presidential vote count in each of America’s many tens of thousands of precincts.
I’ve looked up the neighborhoods where I was raised and lived as an adult, neighborhoods where my relatives and friends live, neighborhoods and towns I’ve read about in the news— and sometimes places I happen to be driving through.
Of course, because 83% of Americans are clustered in the 3% of America that’s urbanized, and Democrats are overwhelmingly clustered in and around cities, every plain blue-versus-red electoral map of the United States is overwhelmingly red.
Which is why, when he was president, Donald Trump and his minions and supporters compulsively posted and handed out copies of those maps to pretend he’d won by a landslide.
Lately, as I was plotting my longest U.S. driving trip in years — two weeks to visit friends in rural…
