elections

Robert Kosara from EagerEyes made a chart to show how the swing states have chosen to vote for the past 100 years. He also made the data available for people who wanted to try different approaches. I had my go at it and this is the result.

 

One of the first things I though was that there is no better ‘code’ than words and I wanted to use the states names to do this visualization. Since there are same small names and some very large ones I choose to use the letters used in the abbreviations of the states names. I think that since I’m not American I needed to still have the states full name. By having the states named with two letters the data can be read by ‘cutting’ the 100 years in half and I enjoyed that and some of the data really works like that in some states (there are some really impressive changes from the tendencies of the first half of the century and the second half).

 

On the other hand, one can look to both letters and have a quick feeling on the color that the state ‘is’.

 

Another set of data that could be of interest is the percentage of the times that each state got the president they had chosen. Maybe I will look at this when I have a little more time. More on whatype.wordpress.com/

Done