More cool cartograms

This is not a squished butterfly or a rampaging elephant.  It's a cartogram by Michael Gastner and colleagues from the University of Michigan showing a county-level election map of the United States where the relative sizes of the counties are based on population, not geographic area.  Check out the entire page which starts with the familiar red/blue election map and iteratively deforms it to show the voting patterns of individual voters.

Are these types of cartograms useful, other than for making democrats feel slightly better?  Probably not, but they're neat to look at and they represent the continuum of political belief in this country far better than geographic maps. 

I guess it really is a rampaging elephant, after all.

Thanks to Lee Wright for the link.