> mostly blue when the blue party wins and mostly red when the red party wins, which is nigh impossible because that's an incredibly nonlinear process
The 2016 neutralizing map (right below the purple map) does this. I think it more closely matches people's perceptions about how their community aligns politically, too.
Literally white-washing (well, hue-desaturating) less populous areas out communicates something different. If you want to communicate impact on election outcome, then you just need to weight the vote per person based on people per elector instead of totaling the voting population in each area.
