What a Second Civil War would actually mean

I've heard a lot of talk about "civil war" lately, especially in the press.

Note that some data sources do not indicate an uptick in the use of the term "civil war" — Google Trends: nope. Google Books Ngram Viewer: nope.

(TODO — Maybe use the NOW Corpus ("News on the Web") (or maybe the "Unified Representation of Twitter and Online News" data is available?) to graph the frequency of use of "civil war" since 2008)

"The US isn't red or blue, it's actually purple"

And it's true. Look at a county-level map of the 2020 election, and most counties have >20% voting for the minority party in that county.

It's true that there are a few highly polarized districts on that map:

• Wyoming:
  • Campbell County (population 46,026 as of 2020) — 9.9% Biden
  • Big Horn County (population 11,521 as of 2020) — 13.8% Biden
  • Crook County (population 7,181 as of 2020) — 9.2% Biden
  • Weston County (population 6,838 as of 2020) — 10.2% Biden
  • Niobrara County (population 2,467 as of 2020) — 11.9% Biden
• Texas:
  • Upton County (population 3,308 as of 2020) — 10% Biden
  • Sheffield (population 600 as of 2000) — 7% Biden
  • Midkiff (population 245 as of 2000) — 6% Biden

(population figures are from some recent decennial census)

... but on the whole, most counties have >20% voting for the minority party. This means that a partition, regardless of how it would actually be drawn, would mean a HUGE migration, like the kind not seen since the 1947 partition of India.

Appendix A — other map variations

• I've seen maps that distort the state map by the population size or the number of electoral college votes. (AKA "warping cartograms")
• I've seen maps that propose different color gradients:
  • Neutralizing election map