politics – Page 11 – Coffee Spoons

Flaking Out of the Senate

This has been a busy week. I am working on a small piece on the Red Sox managers in the free agency period—I thought it would be ready yesterday, but not so much—but news continues to happen outside of the baseball world. Some of the biggest, at least in the US, would have to be the speech by Senator Flake of Arizona who announced he would not seek re-election in 2018.

So cue the politically-themed graphics. Today’s piece comes from the Washington Post. The graphic itself is not terribly complex as it is a scatter plot comparing the liberal/conservativeness of senators with how their respective state voted in 2016.

Scrolling through the piece changes the graphic

But what the piece does really well is weave a narrative through the chart. Scrolling down the page locks the graphic in place while the text changes to provide new context. And then different dots are highlighted or called out.

It proves that not all the best graphics need to be terribly complex.

Credit for the piece goes to Kevin Schaul and Kevin Uhrmacher.

The Ratio

And I’m not talking about walking into a bar late at night. Instead, I am talking about the ratio of likes to retweets to replies, which, for those of you unfamiliar with the service, refers to engagement with a person’s tweets on Twitter.

The Ratio does not come from FiveThirtyEight—read the article for the full background on the concept, it is well worth the read—but they applied it to President Trump, whom we all know has a penchant for tweeting. The basic premise of the ratio is that you want more retweets and likes than replies. Think of it like customer reviews. Rarely do people bother to put the effort in to complement good service, but they will often write scathing reviews if something does not fit their expectations. Same in Twitter. If I do not care for what you say, I will let you know. But if I do, it is easy for me to like it, or even retweet it.

Anyway, the point is they took this and applied it to the tweets of Donald Trump and received this chart.

The interactivity makes this chart worth checking out

What I truly enjoy is the interactivity. Each dot reflects a tweet, and you can reveal that tweet by hovering over it. (I would be curious to know if the dots move. That is, do they, say, refresh daily with new tabulations on the updated numbers of likes, retweets, and replies?)

But the post goes on using the same chart form, in both other interactive displays and as static, small multiple pieces, to explore the political realm of previous tweeting presidents and current senators.

A solid article with some really nice graphics to boot.

Credit for the piece goes to Oliver Roeder, Dhrumil Mehta, and Gus Wezerek.

Whom the Tax Reforms Will Benefit Most

Yesterday the New York Times published a piece looking at the potential impacts of the proposed tax reforms on Americans. Big caveat, not a lot has been detailed about what the reforms entail. Instead, much remains vague. But using the bits that are clear, the Tax Policy Centre has explored some possible impacts and the Times has visualised them.

I like the opening graphic, though all are informative, that cycles through various proposals. It highlights which group benefits most from the proposals. The quick takeaway is that while all would moderately benefit, the rich do really well.

Credit for the piece goes to Ernie Tedeschi.

(Lack of) Support for Cassidy-Graham Obamacare Repeal

A wee bit of housekeeping here at the top. Your author will be away for work and then enjoying a well-earned, but all-too-brief holiday over the next week.

At the end of the week, the Senate’s window to pass a budget reconciliation measure, i.e. what they need to do to repeal Obamacare with only 51 votes, will close for a year. As of my writing on Monday evening, Susan Collins has just become the third Republican no vote, effectively dooming the bill should it come to the floor for the vote.

But as the week progresses, I fully expect the bill’s authors to add some bells and whistles to try and sweeten the deal. But the problem has always been, the bells for the hardline conservatives push moderates away and the whistles for those same moderates drive away the same hardline conservatives. For the next year and a half or so, the best bet to pass a fix to healthcare is a bipartisan “repair Obamacare” instead of “repeal Obamacare”. Whether or not the Senate will have the stomach for such a compromise is yet to be seen.

In the meantime, this week we have a tracker from the Washington Post examining the latest positions of senators on the Cassidy-Graham bill.

It does a nice job of breaking up the Republican conference not just along the ideological spectrum, but also on the winners and losers spectrum. After all, the bill as written will transfer large sums of aid from states that accepted the expansion of Medicare to those states that rejected expansion.

Who's saying yes and who's saying no — Who’s saying yes and who’s saying no

Credit for the piece goes to Kim Soffen, Amber Phillips, and Kevin Schaul.

Labour Marches On (into Tory Housing?)

We have a nice little piece from the Economist today, a look at the electoral majority for London-area constituencies and how their housing prices may begin to draw out priced-out Labour votes from London proper.

The political impact of scarce housing supply

What I really like from the design side is the flip of the traditional choropleth density. In other words, we normally see the dark, rich colours representing high percentages. But here, those high majority constituencies are not the ones of focus, so they get the lighest of colours. Instead, the designers point attention to those slimmest of majorities and then offer the context of average home prices.

Credit for the piece goes to the Economist’s Data Team.

A Throwback to Prior Kenyan Elections

Kenya presently waits for the results of its presidential election, one that pitted incumbent Uhuru Kenyatta against Raila Odinga, a many ran but never won candidate. Now, if you will indulge me, the Kenyan elections have interested me since December 2007, which if you recall provoked sectarian violence to break out across the country.

At the time I had just started working at my undergraduate thesis, a book using Fareed Zakaria’s Future of Freedom as the text (with a parallel narrative from Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart) and I wanted to use specific case studies and data to add to the point of the book. Kenya with its election result data and horrific outcome allowed me to do just that. I juxtaposed awful images of that violence with quiet text and a full-page graphic of the results. I still find it one of the stronger spreads in the book, but as we await the results in Kenya, I am hoping that a ten-year anniversary piece will not be required.

And yes, I have learned a lot since 2007. Including my deep-seated antipathy for pie charts.

Credit for the piece goes to a much less knowledgable me.

Blue Dog Democrats

Last week I mentioned that it appeared Politico was running with articles featuring data visualisation. Just this morning I stumbled upon another article, this one about the Blue Dog Democrats. For those that do not know, Blue Dogs are basically a more conservative Democrat and were the remnants of the Democratic south. But in 2010, they got all but wiped out. This article looks at how and where they might just be coming back.

Blue Dogs were largely a faction of the party drawing from the South

If this trend of data-driven and visualised content continues, the Politico could be doing some interesting work over the next year. By then we will be in a rather intense mid-term cycle and there might be some political news to coverage.

Credit for the piece goes to the Politico graphics department.

Comparing the US Healthcare System to the World

Spoiler, we don’t look so great.

In this piece from the Guardian, we have one of my favourite types of charts. But, the piece begins with a chart I wonder about. We have a timeline of countries creating universal healthcare coverage, according to the WHO definition—of which there are only 32 countries. But we then plot their 2016 population regardless of when the country established the system. It honestly took me a few minutes to figure out what the chart was trying to communicate.

This is the only graphic I'm not sure of in the entire piece. — This is the only graphic I’m not sure of in the entire piece.

However, we do get one of my favourite charts: the scatter plot over time. And in it we look at the correlation between spending on healthcare compared to life expectancy. And, as I revealed in the spoiler, for all the money we spend on healthcare—it is not leading to longer lives as it broadly does throughout the world. And care as you might want to blame Obamacare, the data makes clear this problem began in the 1980s.

Someone's getting cheated out of a lot of money. Oh wait, that's us… — Someone’s getting cheated out of a lot of money. Oh wait, that’s us…

And of course Obamacare is why the Guardian published this piece since this is the week of the Vote-a-rama that we expect to see Thursday night. The Republicans will basically be holding an open floor to vote on anything and everything that can get some measure of repeal and/or replace 50 votes. And to wrap the piece, the Guardian concludes with a simple line chart showing the number of uninsured out to 2026. To nobody’s surprise, all the plans put forward leave tens of millions uncovered.

When all the options look bad, why not work with what you have?

It is a fantastic piece that is well worth the read, especially because it compares the systems used by a number of countries. (That is largely the text bit that we do not cover here at Coffeespoons.) I found the piece very informative.

Credit for the piece goes to the Guardian graphics department.

Let’s All Shake Hands

So this isn’t exactly an infographic, but it’s still great because it let’s me links to sites with the video. It’s about Donald Trump’s handshakes. If you missed yesterday’s two between him and new French president, Emmanuel Macron, well you missed something.

If you want to see the handshake, you can watch it in the video clip at the end of this article from the Telegraph. It sets the stage for the handshake snub that is at the top of said article.

Happy Friday, all.

Credit for the piece goes to the AFP graphics department.

Trump’s Polling

My battery is about to die this morning and I don’t have my charger so this is going to be a shorter piece than usual. But I wanted to look back on the 100 Day polling that the New York Times posted. It does paint an interesting picture of somebody so polarising that Trump is probably safe despite being one of the least favourably viewed presidents in modern times. Why? Because his supporters are so fervently loyal.

Not only is Trump low, he's low historically — Not only is Trump low, he’s low historically

But that piece is almost a month old now. And so I wanted to point out something that FiveThirtyEight is doing—a running tracker of Trump’s polling. I am sure I will return to it in the future, after all we have over three and a half years to go until the next four year presidential term begins.

Credit for the piece goes to Karen Yourish and Paul Murray for the Times and Aaron Bycoffe, Dhrumil Mehta, and Nate Silver for FiveThirtyEight.