[aabhay]

It’s only capping the saturation, so that counties with > 60000 residents are shown in brightest color. The color itself though still varies from red to blue based on percentage vote margin. In my mind, this is a great tradeoff, with the only exception that dark Grey counties (large counties with roughly 50:50 split) are way more important than they look since humans tend to de emphasize greys. I would have preferred a brown or something. Purple is not used as it has an imbalanced perceptual effect.

[s17n]

Right, so basically everybody above the 60000 cap is ignored. Basically the difference between a county with 30000 and 60000 is a lot less important than the difference between a county with 60000 and 600000 - this map is truncating most of the population.