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.