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Description

Firstly, with the red or blue dots on the timeline, we could quickly and easily figure out the winning party of each election. With the detailed # of votes and proportional stacked bar underneath, it could help us have a more quantitative view. That’s the national level understanding.

Then, we could go a step further to look at the states, a hue US map gives a straightforward feeling of how “red” or “blue” (or voting for other party, like in 1924, 1948 and 1968) a state is. Besides, when mouse over a state, its name, # of electoral votes (EV) and % of votes among parties can all be checked in the tooltip. Moreover, by clicking on the state, we could find out how it contributes to the final EV, as the relevant “state block” would obviously pop out in the EV stack bar.

As we know, on the 2016 Election Day, some battleground states came up with unexpected results. To catch such shift, we prepare the cartogram on the right. By looking back at each state’s voting results of two consequence elections, we could see how its political opinion swings. This, together with the last bulletin point, is the state level picture.

What’s more, there are always people who are interested to see more beyond the electoral result facts, like the historical as well as financial background at the certain time to help them digest the electoral results. Also, we do feel it is beneficial to provide such information. So by providing key events happened before the election (like economy had been in recession before 1992, while was recovered when 1996 election came), the media endorsement for party as well as the annual GDP and unemployment rate, we hope these in addition to the result data, could stimulate people’s thoughts to dig the possible correlation between the results and some factors.

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Credits

This project was created by Duanduan Liu, Kanrong Yu and Weina Chen for a graduate course in Data Visualization at WPI taught by Lane Harrison. It is composed by D3. Data courtesy of Dave Leip's Atlas of U.S. Presidential Elections, American Presidency Project: Presidential Election Data, Labor Force Statistics from the Current Population Survey and Newspaper presidential endorsements.

Much of the inspiration for this report comes from NYTimes There Are Many Ways to Map Election Results. We’ve Tried Most of Them., LIVE RESULTS AND MAPS Election Results 2016 and 42 States Shifted to the Right in 2016.

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Source Code

The source code and raw data are available on github.