yo listen up here's a story
about a little guy that lives in a blue world
and all day and all night and everything he sees
is just blue like him inside and outside

We won on election day and I am happy about that. What I am less happy about is the way that geographical regions are always portrayed as all red or all blue. Sure, Pennsylvania went blue, but it was at most a slightly blue purple. Even when things are blue, there are degrees of blueness. For example, here is my world:

With the exception of my district of my ward, each time my community narrowed, it was bluer. Cool.

Of course, even this is not the full story, since the scale is now shown. I considered making a giant 11,000 x 11,000 pixel image showing them all down to scale with one pixel representing one voter. But let's be honest: nobody is interested in looking at a giant picture just to see how blue John's house is (100%!). So, maybe we can still get some sense of scale by looking at each layer and its immediate child.

Obama's win in Pennsylvania was pivotal in the networks' ability to call the election for him as early as they did. Despite that, Pennsylvania represented only 4.7% of the voters this year and as only slightly bluer than the US as a whole (55% vs. 52%):

That Allegheny county was home to 11% of Pennsylvania's voters is nice reminder of how oddly structured the population in our state is. Giant globs of people around Pittsburgh, Philadelphia, and Erie with much lower population everywhere else. Luckily for Obama, Allegheny county was bluer than the state (57% vs. 55%).

Pittsburgh is my home and I love it, but we've been losing population and that shows painfully when we see that we accounted for only 24% of our county's voters. On the other hand, we had massive blue power. 75% of Pittsburgh's voters went for Obama:

For voting purposes, Pittsburgh is chopped up into about a thousand separate pieces! Okay, not a thousand. There are 32 wards and I live in the 11th ward. Now we're talking blue! 89% of my ward went for Obama!

Each ward of Pittsburgh is fractured into multipled districts. Ward 11 only has 9 districts, although others go as high as 41. Here my world let me down and failed to get bluer as it got smaller. Only 82% of my district went blue. Respectable, but not more than my ward.

Finally, we have my house. My wife and I are the only voters here and we both supported Obama, so we get a nice full blue in the center of my world.

And that is my little blue world.

If anyone really wants the giant picture, ask nicely and maybe I'll make it. Maybe.