Soon after his unlikely victory in 2016, Donald Trump began embracing a very weird map that showed the results of that year’s election on a county-by-county level, a sea of red with a few blue fields scattered throughout. He was obsessed with the map, hanging it up in the White House and passing it out to reporters. The issues with the map are obvious—land can’t vote—and have been explained many times by multiple outlets. But whatever happens on election night, win or lose, it seems pretty obvious that Trump will go back to touting his success with all that land.
Every four years, we all return to the electoral map as it fills in on TV, but while we wait for the vote totals to trickle in, there’s a map vacuum. In its place comes a variety of gag maps, and after a surreal election in 2016, this year’s memes are taking the maps to their logical limit.
Perhaps in anticipation of the return of his dad’s favorite map, Donald Trump Jr. posted his own map to Twitter this morning, a Mercator projection world map with most of the countries filled in with red, except for China, India, Mexico, and a few other outliers that don’t really make sense. It was seemingly cribbed from 4chan, and thus likely not motivated by his own personal animus toward the country of Liberia or faith in the electoral persistence of the Antarctica’s penguins and tardigrades.
Ringo Starr referenced one of Jeb! Bush’s lasting legacies in the discourse when he posted his map, a bowl-cut-era photo of him presiding over a lavender flawless victory. If, like John Mulaney said on this week’s episode of Saturday Night Live, an election is simply an elderly man contest, we could do worse than deciding to unite behind the most enthusiastic Beatle.
Now that Britney Spears is 38, she’s finally eligible to make a sweep of her own.
And of course, those of us who remember the Coen brothers’ 2009 black comedy, A Serious Man, can understand the terror and fear elicited by the threat of a Sy Ableman sweep.
Over on stan Twitter, another flawless victory was the talk of the town. One poster was discussing the fact that Biden could make it to 538 electoral votes easily if he had embraced the opening line of Nicki Minaj’s 2014 single “Only.”
In October 2016, FiveThirtyEight’s Nate Silver shared a map that illustrated the Clinton win that would have resulted if only women had voted in the following election. The map meme is a great opportunity to test out other such thought experiments. What if, say, you limited the votes only to the community of semi-active jam-band followers?
There’s a chance that, come tomorrow, we might never want to look at an electoral map ever again. There’s a chance that next week, a new civil war could make our maps totally illegible. But until then, it’s easy to have some fun with 270toWin.
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