Hoo boy! It's not just conservatives who are looking at that electoral map of Massachusetts and thinking how much it resembles the national electoral map following George Bush's second election victory. No less a leftie than Joan Vennochi, the liberal Boston Globe's version of Maureen Dowd (except with more brains), uses the similarities of the two maps to illustrate the possibility that as goes Massachusetts, so goes the nation.

Vennochi points out that the most of the significant blue areas on the Massachusetts map are the liberal enclaves in the East, the West and vote-rich, metro areas, just as was the case nationally in the 2004 presidential election. The less densely populated but blue, Western Massachusetts is apparently so different from the rest of the state that it warrants its own Wikipedia page, where under the heading Demographics is found this possibly explanatory quote:

This far-western zone is linked to New York City and Albany, New York more than with the rest of Massachusetts, however both populated zones are ultimately part of the northeast megalopolis.