All campaign operatives are, to some extent, geographers, and the map of the United States, endlessly studied, is the object of their pieties and contains their own compulsions. Every operative has his own map, weighted by income, by ethnicity, by the practiced habits of ideology, but each believes his map is determinative and that elections do not contain surprises but more precise revelations of the map, of tendencies buried deep.

I love this imagery. This is totally my feeling about election results, too – that political maneuvering works to a point, but ultimately we’re revealing some hideously complicated game board that everyone is striving to understand. This is totally unrealistic, but I kind of want it to be true.

Reminds me, too, of the bit in My Tiny Life (that link has a free PDF of the book) in which he talks about the troubles of virtual geography and the point at which the map is as big as the space it’s ostensibly mapping.