Once party affiliation became less splashy for news networks’ interactive election maps, the media decided to divvy us up into colors. Red state, blue state, shades of purple for those swing areas if they really wanted to get fancy. The underlying narrative, particularly when those shades of purple are left out of the conversation, is that red and blue make hard stops at congressional and state borders. Like Rush Limbaugh and Keith Olbermann, they just don’t mix.