Check Mate; King is Dead

I was catching up on my reading and found this graph over at Ace’s place:

It is attached to this story and in particular this line from Ezra Klein: “But so far as liberalism goes, this is a pretty devastating graph.”

Before I’d read a word, my first impression on seeing the graph was simply: “wow, that looks remarkably like checkmate — the outline of a chess king slain.”

I guess it works both ways. Anyone else?