cartograms!
While noodling around during a coffee break, I found this awesome page. A professor at University of Michigan took maps of the 2008 presidential election results and turned them into cartograms, by weighting the area of each state by its population. It gives you a great visual sense of just how "blue" the country really is. And there are neat variations with county-level results, and shades of purple, and all kinds of stuff.