Tag: Ohio

Ohio 12th Results

Last week parts of Ohio voted for a special election in the 12th Congressional District. Historically it has been a solidly Republican district by margins in the double digits. However, last week Republicans barely managed to hold the seat by, at the latest count I saw, less than one percentage point. Why? Well, it turns out that Republican support is bleeding away from one of the traditional strongholds: suburban counties.

I saw this data set late last week on Politico and I knew instinctively that it needed to be presented in another form than a table. Consequently I sketched out how it could work as small multiples of area charts to highlight just how Republican the district is. This is the digitisation of that take. Unfortunately my original sketch also featured a map of the district to show how this falls to the north and east of the city of Columbus. But I did not have time for that. Instead, I sketched up something else, but I need time to work on that. So for now, this concept will have to suffice.

That flip to the Democrats in Franklin County could be a problem come November
That flip to the Democrats in Franklin County could be a problem come November

Credit for the piece is mine.

How Similar Are Pennsylvania and Ohio?

At least politically.

According to this piece from FiveThirtyEight, maybe not as much as they used to be. From a data visualisation standpoint, what stuck out at me was this plot of correlations of how similar various states are. Basically, the closer to the number 1, the more similar, the closer to 0, the less.

Turns out they're not so close
Turns out they’re not so close

I might question the value of placing the numbers within the squares—see what I did there?—because the colours could be used with a legend to indicate the range of similarity. But if this were an interactive piece, it certainly could be done to reveal the number on tap or mouseover.

Anyway, it was interesting to see that among swing states, Pennsylvania is least like Georgia but most like Minnesota. The former, certainly. The latter, who would have guessed, don’t ya know.

Credit for the piece goes to the FiveThirtyEight graphics department.