All this talk of a country divided seems a little over done to me. So many Democrats invested so much in ousting President Bush that it’s no surprise that many feel like moving to Canada. But some clear thinking (and a little time) seems to show that the divisions aren’t as stark as we thought they were. I wanted to provide two final examples before I quit talking about politics for 3 1/2 years.

1. This graphic from researchers at the University of Michigan pretty clearly debunks the ‘Red State’ myth. It’s a cartogram of county voting results where only the counties that were solidly Bush are in red. The borderline counties are in purple, and as you can see it changes the picture somewhat.

via Gastner, Shalizi, and Newman’s U Mich. site.

2. I think this graphic from this Sunday’s New York Times illustrates how meaningless a lot of the party rhetoric is. What divides one person from another isn’t their political affiliation, but what they believe and how they act. I take from this graphic the lesson that we are all a lot more similar than we might have thought.

via NY Times, Sunday, Novemeber 21 2004, Week in Review (link)