One complication is how exactly you draw the boundaries of the American empire. I'd argue that the informal boundaries - the large collection of vassal states - make the imperial system much larger than just the borders of CONUS ... which doesn't make administrating the beast any easier.
Redrawing state boundaries to e.g. split apart red counties from blue cities might help keep the peace. On the other hand, resistance would be significant. Redrawing the map in such a fashion would result in red states vastly outnumbering blue states, meaning the Senate would be perpetually dominated by red team; blue team won't go for that.
The other issue is that Congress ends up ballooning in size. It's already dysfunctional with hundreds of members; what does it look like with thousands?
Re: footnote 6. Yes, there is probably a more gradual gradient between deep blue and deep red, but there is probably more red than the map shows. Take, for example, San Bernardino County, CA. (It's not hard to find--it's the largest county on the entire map.) Most of the population (and most of the blue population) is in the extreme southwest of the county. The rest is desert sparsely populated with red-teamers. So Southern CA is much redder than the map shows (by area, not population, of course).
One complication is how exactly you draw the boundaries of the American empire. I'd argue that the informal boundaries - the large collection of vassal states - make the imperial system much larger than just the borders of CONUS ... which doesn't make administrating the beast any easier.
Redrawing state boundaries to e.g. split apart red counties from blue cities might help keep the peace. On the other hand, resistance would be significant. Redrawing the map in such a fashion would result in red states vastly outnumbering blue states, meaning the Senate would be perpetually dominated by red team; blue team won't go for that.
The other issue is that Congress ends up ballooning in size. It's already dysfunctional with hundreds of members; what does it look like with thousands?
Re: footnote 6. Yes, there is probably a more gradual gradient between deep blue and deep red, but there is probably more red than the map shows. Take, for example, San Bernardino County, CA. (It's not hard to find--it's the largest county on the entire map.) Most of the population (and most of the blue population) is in the extreme southwest of the county. The rest is desert sparsely populated with red-teamers. So Southern CA is much redder than the map shows (by area, not population, of course).