Mike Bostock's example with US counties is modified for states, adding a state ID indicator on hover and a click response: the beginnings of a map-based user interface. For accessibility, a supplementary alphabetized list of states is also provided.
Mike Bostock has a github repo with code to automatically pull census shapefiles and convert them to TopoJSON
The chart is at a coarser resolution than in Mike Bostock's demo, and does not include the different 'land' and 'state' objects. File size is only 20kb. I tried an order of magnitude smaller (quantization of 1e3) and the state boundaries did not close. At even this resolution Hawaii is barely noticeable. file size is not much different after adding the additional state properties. The new Makefile entry (in the us-atlas project)
topo/us-states-100k-ungrouped.json: shp/us/states.shp
mkdir -p $(dir $@)
node_modules/.bin/topojson \
-o $@ \
--no-pre-quantization \
--post-quantization=1e4 \
--simplify=7e-5 \
-e fips2abbr.tsv \
--properties STATE,STATE_FIPS,ORDER_ADM,MONTH_ADM,DAY_ADM,YEAR_ADM,ABBR=ABBR \
--id-property=+STATE_FIPS \
-- $<