I live on county maps. They offer an accessible, yet incredibly rich way to understand the diversity of our country.

But they’re also imperfect. An unfamiliar eye might draw the wrong lessons, like concluding that the country is overwhelmingly Republican.

According to Dave Weigel, a handful of conservatives in Virginia are struggling to reconcile a state painted red with a narrow McAuliffe victory. Obviously, the explanation is that the handful of “blue” counties have many, many more people than the “red” counties.

In fairness to those Virginia conservatives, this is a common issue. A couple of months ago, a map of AIDS in the United States went viral with the accompanying statistic that 92 percent of AIDS cases occur in 25 percent of counties.

But what percent of the population lives in those same 25 percent of counties? I actually don’t know, but I know that 84 percent of Americans live in the largest 25 percent of counties. I also know that 50 percent of the population lives in 5 percent of counties. So the statistic was mainly, although not exclusively, telling us that most people live in a handful of counties. There might be something interesting about where people with AIDS live (like, they’re probably more likely to live in urban counties) but that was left for me to deduce from my unreasonable level of knowledge of America’s counties.