By Alicia Parlapiano, November 1, 2016: “Tuesday’s print edition of The New York Times has the most detailed election map we’ve ever produced: ZIP-code level results for the 2012 presidential race spread across four pages, using data from Catalist. The map is part of a special election section that aims to help explain the political geography of the United States — identifying where people who are conservative and liberal live and pointing out how physical boundaries, like the Rio Grande and the Cascade Mountains, often align with political ones. This level of detail reveals patterns otherwise masked in a state or county-level map, like the presence of small, Democratic urban areas in even the reddest states, and the stripes of red, yellow and blue along Long Island in New York. When I look at my hometown of Rockford in northern Illinois, the map reveals the delineation created by the Rock River, with the majority-minority ZIP codes west of the river voting more Democratic, and the majority-white ones on the east side voting more Republican. Just like the county-level map below, the bulk of the map is covered in red. Less-populated areas that cover the center of the country tend to vote Republican, while smaller, densely populated places along the coasts and in large cities lean Democratic. This provokes a common complaint about shaded-area “choropleth” maps like this: They are misleading because they seem to suggest that the vast majority of America votes Republican…”