If you spend much of any time looking around the interwebs for political news, you’ll almost certainly run across one a them post-election maps of the U.S. House of Representatives that shows vast swaths of America red and turning reddrer, while small blue pockets continue to shrink.

Now intellectually you probably realize this is meaningless. If not, here’s Dave Weigel:

But there’s a tendency, which some Republicans will definitely seek to reinforce, to treat territory as somehow endowing the people who occupy it with more legitimacy than others. That this red sea of sparsely occupied land happens largely to coincide with the ancestral stomping grounds of Real Americans–you know, the folks whose votes should count more because they pay the taxes and hew to the Founders’ divinely inspired notions of absolute property rights and Zygote Personhood–is probably just a coincidence.

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Ed Kilgore is a political columnist for New York and managing editor at the Democratic Strategist website. He was a contributing writer at the Washington Monthly from January 2012 until November 2015, and was the principal contributor to the Political Animal blog.