Thinking about that Map

This evening, flipping through channels -- pressing harder on the remote when the channel seemed to have anything about the election -- I stopped and went back to one channel. It was the Weather Channel. I turned to my wife and said 'Isn't it nice to see a map that doesn't have blues, reds, and notes about electoral votes?'

The image of that last map put up with CNN sticks with me. And though I desperately wanted Kerry to win -- my wife said this evening that I seemed to be furious at Kerry, and I was, for most of the day -- I have to reluctantly admit one thing. If Kerry had won Ohio, and therefore the election, resulting in a map that was blue along both coastlines, dipping down across Pennsylvania and into Ohio, then up, and left the other 60% of the states red -- I would have thought that there was something wrong with the map. Because regardless of population centers, it doesn't seem right for someone to get to be President when they haven't won in a majority of the states.

That could be my simplistic view of life, burning me again. Because it could be that, guess what, nobody wins a majority of the states -- more accurately, nobody wins because they won a majority of the states. They win because a majority of the people voted for them, regardless of where those people reside. Just happens that the population density is greater near the water.

Yet for some reason, the idea of winning without winning a majority of the states -- that bothers me.