The cartogram was made using the diffusion method of Gastner and Newman. Population data was taken from the 2000 US Census.
The cartogram reveals what we know already from the news: that the country was actually very evenly divided by the vote, rather than being dominated by one side or the other.
The presidential election is not decided on the basis of the number of people who vote each way, however, but on the basis of the electoral college. Each state contributes a certain number of electors to the electoral college, who vote according to the majority in their state. The candidate receiving a majority of the votes in the electoral college wins the election. The electoral votes are apportioned roughly according to states’ populations, as measured by the census, but with a small but deliberate bias in favor of smaller states.
We can represent the effects of the electoral college by scaling the sizes of states to be proportional to their number of electoral votes, which gives a map that looks like this:
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