General Map Question

[Beezer]

I hope this is the right subforum for this kind of question. I'm currently working on a seminar at a German university on the realignment and polarization of the US electorate. As part of that class I'd like to create a couple of maps to illustrate the growing rift between voters. I've thought about creating a map of counties in which either candidate won by 20 or more points both in 1976 and 2012 (since the elections were somewhat similar in terms of the national vote). For that I'd need two things...first of all a map with counties that I can color in (found one on Wikipedia, but maybe there's a better one?) and secondly a good quick overview of the counties in question. I suppose for the second part I could look at the Atlas on a state by state basis but maybe someone knows a faster way of finding these counties.

Thanks for any suggestions.

[True Federalist (진정한 연방 주의자)]

The U.S. Presidential Election Results board isn't a bad place to ask for help, but the Political Geography & Demographics board might be better.

Do be aware that while county borders are largely stable these days, there have been a few changes between 1976 and 2012, with the most recent new county I'm aware of being Broomfield County, Colorado, created in 2001 from parts of Adams, Boulder, Jefferson, and Weld counties. The Census Bureau has a listing of the significant changes it is aware of at: http://www.census.gov/geo/www/tiger/ctychng.html . Alas there are no maps there.

Also Alaska doesn't have counties, and the equivalents that are used for election and other purposes tend to be fairly fluid.  Those plus changes involving the independent cities of Virgina make up the bulk of the changes listed on the link I gave above.

[Oldiesfreak1854]

I just copy and paste some of the county maps from here and color them gray to set defaults.  However, I would love to know if there is a site where I can get maps like that as well.