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The Seattle Times political team explores national, state and local politics.

“How Obama Won Re-election“, from The New York Times.

Data journalists have been calling out some of the best interactive work from Election Night and the day after. Here are some of the contenders so far:

1. NPR used what has been dubbed a “Tetris-style” election results app, providing a link to the more traditional AP map as well.
2. The Huffington Post used a scatterplot (see lower right of this page) to show how Obama’s county-by-county performance in 2012 compared to his 2008 numbers.
3. The Orange County Register’s Ron Campbell built a live precinct map showing all 1,977 precincts in Orange County for president and two state initiatives on taxes and death penalty.
4. The Guardian has published a roundup of a number of visualizations, from the NYT’s bubble map to WNYC’s demographic patchwork map.
5. The New York Times built several interesting visualizations, including one before the election that tracked the possible paths Obama and Romney had to the presidency. And then this morning they published an illustrative graphic explaining how Obama won even though he lost among white voters. The tool used motion, bubble charts, simple arrows and a spare amount of narrative to explain what happened.

Have you run across any great tools that help make sense of the election’s outcome? Share them in the comments.