I shortened the headline because, well, it didn't fit...and also, I think "silences minorities" is a little strong. If the 538 map [1] in question aimed to argue something along the lines of, "Why do minorities have so much voting power when they represent so little of the country?"...then sure. But sometimes a standard choropleth is used when geopolitical boundaries and distinctions are important. I'm not sure that they're particularly important for "The Facebook Primary"...on the other hand, in the context of presidential elections, geopolitical boundaries are generally more relevant to the reader...because of the way presidents are decided via electoral college rather than popular vote.
That said, I absolutely agree that awareness and practice of cartograms is needed, as there are plenty of times when such geopolitical-agnostic granularity is needed. But it's not just a tradeoff in difficulty in production and design...cartograms are more abstract to the viewer, and the more geopolitical data that you fuzz over, the more you might as well just make a labeled bar chart...which also is an underused format these days, because very few people will want to decorate their articles and essays with bar charts when maps are just as easy to make.