Monday, May 12th, 2008
Visualizing the Democratic Primary
Like lots and lots of people, I’ve been following this year’s election very closely. I’m not into sports, so this is about the closest to it I get. And, like an avid sports fan, I’m transfixed by the stats: the numbers that tell how the teams are doing. Here’s how CNN shows it (as of 5/12/09):
Very pretty. Lots of smiling faces and exciting vertical lines. Unfortunately, for all those pixels, there’s a hell of a lot of chartjunk. It’s enough to drive a Tufte-fanboy like me crazy.
Lets focus on just the actual chart part of the image:
See anything missing? I’ll give you a hint. This is showing the status of the democratic candidate race. Don’t races usually have finish lines? For all we can tell, Obama and Clinton are neck and neck (argh, graphical pun not intended)… somewhere… in the middle of the race.
But that isn’t the case at all. Let’s see if we can improve it a bit:
This actually shows the status of the race relative to the finish line. As you can see, the finish line is looming but Obama and Clinton are still pretty close. Clinton has about 89% of the votes that Obama has so far.
But actually, I still don’t think this is the best we can do. The way I look at it, the accumulated votes aren’t as important as the remaining votes needed. It’s distance from the finish line that matters. If you’re running a 500 meter sprint and you’re 20 meters behind your opponent 100 meters in, you’ve still got 400 meters to catch up. If you’re 20 meters behind and 40 from the finish line, it’s over.
It’s the relative remaining distance that matters. Let’s focus on that:
Now things don’t look so close. Now lets see what the upcoming races can hope to do:
Now it becomes obvious how much of a challenge Clinton has ahead of her.
Edit: I’ll be removing any political comments. I appreciate the feedback, but I’m sure you can find better forums for that. I’m more interested in discussing the charts themselves.
May 13th, 2008 at 2:14 am
Great work! But doesn’t the final visualization need to include the remaining undeclared superdelegates that don’t happen to be from one of the remaining primary states? By definition the number of possible remaining delegates needs to equal the red portions of the chart (okay, okay, minus one vote), since a candidate who got exactly the number they needed for a majority would have exactly one vote (or in some cases two votes) more than the runner-up.
May 13th, 2008 at 4:08 am
What do you use for your visualizations?
May 13th, 2008 at 6:47 am
Kevin: Good point. I meant to put those in, but honestly, it was getting late and I was lazy.
diesel: Photoshop! I thought about something a little more automatic, but the charts were pretty simple and I wanted them to be just so. Excel can be pretty frustrating if you want to control it to the tiniest degree.
May 13th, 2008 at 9:00 am
I appreciate the visualization that is so often left out of this kind of analysis. I like your analogy of a sprint; since March Madness I’ve been thinking of it like a basketball game. If you’re down 12 points with 2 minutes left, it’s expected that you’ll foul to stop the clock, and shoot a bunch of threes to catch up. However, if your opponent makes their free throws, and you make only a couple of 3-pointers, finding yourself down 10 with only 15 seconds left, it’s time to stop fouling and just hold the ball to run out the clock. Your visualization is like the clock at the bottom of the screen - at some point, even before :00, everyone knows the game is over.
May 13th, 2008 at 9:49 am
Nicely done!
May 13th, 2008 at 9:50 am
Well said, Rey!
May 13th, 2008 at 11:40 am
Great job. I haven’t seen it illustrated so clearly before.
May 13th, 2008 at 11:43 am
One more comment. It’s in the best interests for CNN to show the contest as close. If they showed it as you did people would realize that as far as the delegate count Hillary has no chance.
Something to add would be the number of uncommitted super delegates and what Florida and Michigan would bring to the table.
May 13th, 2008 at 1:49 pm
Excellent post. I think in journalism they call this “context”. Makes you wonder what kind of charts are floating around inside the Clinton campaign.
May 13th, 2008 at 2:26 pm
John Clegg: One more comment. It’s in the best interests for CNN to show the contest as close.
Brilliant. I didn’t think of that, but you’re totally right.
Something to add would be the number of uncommitted super delegates
Yeah, I wanted to add that too, but it was getting late…
May 13th, 2008 at 11:54 pm
Why aren’t there any numbers on the blue bars that have the last of the primaries? The lovely thing that this does show is that neither can wrap it up before the convention. It’s been awhile since we’ve had an undecided candidate at the convention (68′? 40 years?). One or two behind-the-scenes deals and all the super delegates could roll either way. Exciting stuff.
May 14th, 2008 at 12:47 am
[…] of information design? Because even the professionals get it very wrong a lot of the time. Bob Nystrom wrote a great post about how little information is presented in CNN’s chart of the delegate totals for Hillary […]
May 14th, 2008 at 8:05 am
Rodney: Good call. Probably should have put those on there.