Visualizing US Election By County(2004 to 2016)

In my continuing understand patterns of different states, I know most of states will consistently voted to specific party, and the same few swing states usually decide the election. And I want to figure out which county will impact the election and how these county changes their seats over time?

  • Context

    • Voter turnout: Voter turnout is the percentage of eligible voters who cast a ballot in an election.In this dataset age and citizenship status are the criteria used to determine eligibility,.

    • Voters: The total number of eligible Voters.

    • Margin: Margins: The "margin" of A over B is the number of votes saying A>B, minus the number saying B>A.

  • Encoding

    Area encodong: Bubble areas are proportional to the fraction of votes. If you choose state, the number of voters are national voters. If you slect county, the number of voters are the eligible voters in that county.The circle more big means there are more voters.

    Color encoding: The red is represents the Republic Party and the blue represents Democrat party. The more close middle yScale means the more swing fraction. When circle more chose to boundary, these county or states have less possibilty to change their seats.

  • Interactivity
    • Filter: Click through years to see the changes in margin and turnout. Search by state or county to view a subset of counties. For example, if you want to check all the counties in the CA, search CA and then select county. Clear button to chear the filter.
    • Tooltips: Tooltips show both the county level and state level data on mouseover. It will show the county name/state name, county/state turnout, voters and D/R margin percentage.






    • Conclusion

      Since the number of counties are too much, it is hard to find a specific or absolute conclusion. We can draw some conclusions from this scatter plot. The counties with more population which means with larger circle area will be less likely to change their seat and also will align to Democrat, vice viersa, the relative smallest counties also consistently support Republican. You can search Texas, California to give it a shot.

      When we want to see how these counties vote over time, using year button localted in the right-buttom of svg to observe the change will be the best way.

    • Search Instruction

      The search function is just merely based on a regular expression of string search which is consist of the abrreviation of state name and the whole name of county, so if you want to search a specific state like Florida, you need to type FL in the search input. and if you want to search a county, like Los Angeles County, you need to type whole name for this county. Since there is too much counties, and I think search is most convient way to locate to a specific county.