By popular demand, I've changed the design of the chart to the one shown above. The main downside to this chart style is that I've had to switch the scale from Electoral votes to percentage of the total. Unfortunately, 538 is almost a prime number, so they only scale lines that I could get OpenOffice to display were either every single vote, or only at 269. I wanted to have some additional scale lines for reference, so I switched to percentages. Each scale line represents about 54 EVs (53.8).
The other obvious change is that I switched from an area chart to a column chart. Personally, I like the look of the area chart better, but I don't like the way it displays the transition from the dasys with data to the days without (see Sept. 10 in the chart in the post "An Alternate View"). Switching to the column chart fixes that little artifact.
I looked seriously at doing the chart in a vertical layout. I like the idea a lot, but in the end I decided against it for a couple of reasons, mainly that people with smaller displays will have a hard time being able to see the entire image at one time. Since that's one of the reasons that I made the chart to begin with, it seemed like a bad idea to give it up without a better reason.
As always, you feedback is welcome in the comments!
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7 comments:
That is the best visualization yet! I think it will be easier for more people to immediately grasp the balance and trend. The daily bar format is better than the spiky line graph, too.
It's an amazing coincidence that you produced this on the one day when the race is almost exactly evenly matched.
One thing: I wish the 50% line were a little darker or otherwise differentiated from the other 10% lines.
Regarding switching the x and y axes: I don't know about the software complications, but from a visual point of view, viewing even with an 800x600 pixel display, the 538 EV could each consume a pixel of space and still fit in. Then even movements of a single EV would register visually. On the Y-axis, going back 300 days, each day could use a pixel or two of vertical space and still fit in to the 600 px vertical. So I think it's a possible layout (for those of us who prefer it, but many other people like time on the x-axis).
Glad to hear this is being done with Open Office!
You've done a good job. This is the best graph on the web. Thank you for making this available.
Thanks for the feedback, I really appreciate it. I do plan to fiddle with things like the line color a bit more. I'm not a spreadsheet user by trade, so I'm learning a lot of this as I go. So far, I haven't figured out how to make a single grid line more visible than the others. That was one advantage of the area map-- I could just add a new area with fixed values to represent the value. This chart type (Percentage stacked) doesn't seem to allow that. I'm looking at some other options to see if I can come up with something better, but if there are any OpenOffice experts out there who can give me some advice, I'd love to have it.
I really like the old way with the blue above and the red below. I still can't figure out this one and I prefer straight numbers of electoral college votes.
For all I pay for your service, however, I'm willing to take what you give me and be thankful.
I hate fiddling with graphs in Excel when there are days without data too, though, and I never did figure it out.
I like the new chart. One suggestion, add milestone markers as a different colored vertical line (i.e. dem convention, rep convention, Obama becoming nominee, debates, etc.)
evsite... Thanks for the feedback... I'd love to add lines like that, but I fear that the chart is already too information dense. I suspect that adding those extra lines would make the chart very hard to read.
What I may do when I have time is add a legend that simply lists key dates, so you could mentally construct that those extra lines yourself.
I can barely read the new graph. However, I could read the old one easily. The old one told me in electoral vote, and not a popular vote percentage, how many vote each candidate had in barely-won states, weak states, and strong states. Totals for ties and winning over the barely-won states were also given. That was all in an easily read line graph. This new graph is impossible to read, and gives less information.
Sorry Firestar, but you can't please everyone. The overwhelming response has been that the new chart design is preferable. And though it took me a while to come around, I agree too.
For what it's worth, other than being represented as a percentage of the total rather than in actual electoral votes, the new chart design includes all the same information as the old one, just in a slightly different format.
In order to see the ties & barely lost states, just read across to the other side. For example to see how what percentage of the total votes Obama would win if he took all McCain under 5% states, just read the white and light red as Obama states. If you do that today, you can pretty easily see that Obama would take about 66% of the total. 66% of 538 is 355.08, pretty close to his actual total of 354, and certainly as accurate as you could get with the old chart. The new chart even allows you to go farther... Want to know how many votes that Obama would get if all McCain states under 10% switched? About 70%. That would be hard to do with the old chart design. Not good at percentages? Just remember that each 10% is equal to about 54 Electoral votes.
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