What would America look like if every state had the same population?
Redraw the country into 50 regions containing roughly the same number of people.
Equal population produces radically unequal-looking regions.
Dense corridors fracture into small pieces while sparsely populated areas combine into enormous ones. The faint dark lines show the real state borders.
Maps sized by land make sparsely populated places look important and crowded ones look small. When comparing places, ask whether land or people is the fairer unit.
Alaska is part of Region 1; Hawaii is part of Region 7. Each label marks the largest 2023 incorporated place in that region.
Which places would look bigger to you if maps were drawn by people instead of land?
How were these regions created?
U.S. counties were grouped into 50 geographically coherent regions containing roughly equal populations, using U.S. Census Bureau Vintage 2023 county estimates. Connecticut uses 2020 census counties. Mainland regions are contiguous; Alaska and Hawaii are assigned to Pacific regions, and island counties may appear detached.
The method recursively divides counties by population and geography, then refines the result with border-county swaps. Whole counties are preserved, so perfect equality is not always possible. Los Angeles County alone exceeds the target population for one region and is not divided.
These are illustrative Hanten regions, not proposed states or official boundaries.
Explore the same land-versus-people question at the county level
It is the same land-versus-people question our Density Extremes exhibit asks at the county level: once you redraw boundaries around equal numbers of people instead of equal amounts of land, a country’s political map stops looking anything like the one on the wall.