As follow up, or update, to the Triage piece, I offer up this post from an R-blogger. As it stands, there's no code (the author claims ugliness), but does applaud ggplot2. The latter I expected, in that Wickham's book has a section (5.7) on using maps, but not much detail.
Of more interest, is the data source, shown as CCES on the plots. Turns out that this is CCES. While not real time data, as Sparks demonstrates, R and ggplot2 can show both categorical and discrete variable impact over a map. For the Triage project, one would need internal real-time (or close) for the effort to be worthwhile, but I'd wager that it is.
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Lyn LeJeune
Ernesto Che Guevara
Ablonde
Tom Cordle
Peter Breschard
Alan Nothnagle
Salon.com
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This is, technically, a different type of map, but both use color to differentiate value, and the first display is a time morphing one. So, yes, one can use such maps to explore voter (assuming that data is cleaned to include only voters!) sentiment changes of time and place. A bit of work, and this person is a grad student; I suspect what he's posting is intended to be (part of) his dissertation.
I've since visited the subsequent site you recommended, and I'm simply awed. It's likely a visual history of the 20th Century. Even without the dates, one could do a pretty good job of identifying the year -- '32 and blue-shift with the Depression, '48 and green-shift after Truman integrated the armed forces, '68 and another green-shift after the passage of Civil Rights legislation. Then there's the total shift from blue to red in the South. Looking at this certainly belies the claim Rabid Right Republicans aren't racist.
It's also a geography lesson, too, because in the latter images, one can identify many major metro areas of the US as blue patches in a sea of red.