I was catching up on some news tonight and I came upon an unhelpful graphic that was supposed to be helping me understand the whip count (who is voting yes or no) for authorising the use of force in Syria. Below is the original graphic from Think Progress.
I struggled, however, to directly compare the yes and no votes. While I certainly understand that the splits within both parties are a fascinating subplot to the greater issue of will we bomb Syria, the traditional congressional arc visualisation is not helpful here. So using the same numbers, I simply plotted what is essentially a stacked bar chart. In truly heretical, i.e. independent, fashion I mixed the two parties together and placed them at either ends of the chart. The first to reach 50% wins. (If I were updating this live of course.)
Credit for the original goes to Igor Volsky and Judd Legum.
