why not have a more granular heatmap as the main viz? coloring by state boundaries is really unintuitive and often misleading, even without Mercator projection criticisms.
However for us in the cheap seats, we most likely as a group want to see number of people impacted. For that, administrative boundaries are the inverse of what we want given administrative boundaries tend to shrink as population increases.
Just goes to show the gap between B2C and B2B. In this case it seems this company knows their target audience, and it's not us.