FINDING THOSE MEDIAN VOTERS. Kieran at Crooked Timber offers a variety of electoral maps. Henry goes Kieran one better, finding topological deformations of the United States that make county size proportionate to population rather than to square miles. The supporting research is worth a look.

There was a software glitch in these researchers' work that, had it been correct, would have summarized the Democrats' dilemma in one diagram. Instead of there being a median voter with a central mode of preferences, their software produced a histogram of counties with a bimodal pattern of preferences: on one tail, a large number of strongly Democratic counties (urban slums, Central Park West, and assorted university towns?) and a large mass of counties skewed slightly Republican. Reality isn't that orderly.