It is going need someone to put these elections on the map if the public are going to be persuaded to take an interest.
They could be delayed again, because election administrators — the studiously nonpolitical folks in the eye of this political storm — say it takes 60 to 80 days to throw together an election once the maps are complete.
Getting above 350 could be more difficult in 2016 than it was in 2008, when an economic disaster about two months before the election helped swing the map toward Obama's landslide Electoral College victory.
Their loss in the Senate, painful though it is, comes in a year when the election map was dominated by the South and when many senators elected in the Democratic wave of 2008 were up: losses were to be expected.
UK-wide, outside of the North where Labour has been the traditional party of the working class vote, the election map is well and truly blue.
No sooner had the election map turned blue than the Republicans at this party began to point fingers.
The model still estimates Obama's lead at 2.5 percentage points or better (the threshold used to distinguish "tossup" states from the others on the Election Dashboard map) in Wisconsin, Iowa, Nevada and another 20 states accounting for 263 electoral votes, just seven shy of the 270 needed to win.
One person close to Mr. Torricelli sought to wring some good out of the senator's troubles, saying that at least now the national party had his race on the election map.
The group's mood shifts fast, from happiness and hope watching the first Bush-Kerry debate, to gloom on election night, staring at the map of the United States overwhelmed by red.
Baluchistan, which has been torn by sectarian violence and by a war between secessionists and the Pakistani military and its allies, was a particularly dark spot on the election map.
