Welcome to part two of our series on maps and data visualizations in advance of the 2024 U.S. General Election (if you missed it, here’s part one on polling). Today, we’re discussing other indicators of political outcomes, including money in politics, changing demographics, key issues, and previous elections.
Here comes the money
Politics is all about money (unfortunate as that may be). Running campaigns is extremely expensive, so the more money, the better. A lot of that money is hard to track right away, as it’s tied up in a candidate or party’s PACs and super PACs. The Washington Post helps us get a quick sense of who benefits most from Big Money™ in elections:
Reinforcing striking numbers with a simple visual reiterates the message – here, that there is significant imbalance between mega-donation totals.
They also include a list of the top 50 individuals and orgs (also known as “megadonors”) that donate to PACs, including how they lean politically. Here’s a sample of the top ten:
This could just be a table, but the color-coded “Party Lean” column drives home the message even further. Simple, but effective!
How it probably feels seeing the list if you work on the Harris campaign:
The other side of the coin is donations from regular people. WaPo also recently dropped an excellent piece on where individual campaign contributions are coming from, which includes a map showing donor count and donation totals by zip code. This chart allows us to quickly gauge the number of donors per candidate over time, which tells us something about voter engagement and grassroots energy around a campaign.
The article also does a nice job of contextualizing a few meaningful aspects of the data at a state level. For example, suburban women were a key demographic in 2016 and 2020, so having a substantial lead in this group in swing states like Pennsylvania is significant for Harris.
WaPo also provides brief explanations of what these numbers mean to put them in perspective, i.e. 75% of these donors are registered to vote in PA’s suburbs and 70% of those donors gave to Harris. Donor count can be an indicator for voter registration and turnout, but it’s important to acknowledge where data might not be complete to avoid unintended implications.
In summary:
How the electorate has changed
Changing demographics frame each election uniquely, especially at the state level. Reuters took a look at how the population has changed since 2016 in the seven swing states in this election. They note that most of these shifts – an increase in people identifying as mixed-race and non-White – would seem to favor a Democratic candidate, especially a mixed-race candidate like Kamala Harris.
Later in this article, Reuters includes a fascinating visual showing changes in education levels in the voting population since 2016. There’s a lot to unpack here, but the overall pattern is clear: the swing-state electorate is more educated in 2024 than it was in 2016. Democratic candidates tend to fare better among more highly educated populations, so this seems to be another favorable change in demographics for Harris.
This visual conveys a lot of information at once – changes by state (groupings) over time (left vs. right) in five different categories (education level), plus it illustrates the trend (loss/flat/gain) with color. You can also see the share of the voting population each category represents within each state (its size relative to the other categories). This graphic combines many different methods of visualization – color, size, texture – to convey complex, nuanced information in a beautifully simple way.
Issues that matter
With the demographic changes we just discussed in mind, it’s important to think about what issues voters care about at the ballot box. A lot of factors can go into a decision on who to support, including what a voter’s most important issue is, but it’s also worth thinking about whether people are single- or multi-issue voters.
Some issues, like abortion, have a strong single-issue voter demographic, as this chart from Gallup indicates:
As Gallup illustrates with additional data to support this simple chart, abortion is closer to a binary issue than an issue like the economy, which might explain why it’s a clearer indicator of how many people will vote. This quote from their Values and Beliefs poll is telling:
“Specifically, nearly twice as many pro-choice voters (40%) as pro-life voters (22%) say they will only vote for a candidate who agrees with them on abortion.“
This is all important context when considering what the leading issues are in this election. Every election has its key issues, but often the most important issue is the same: the economy (background if you’re curious about 2020, 2016, and 2004-2012). As Bloomberg illustrates, 2024 is no different than previous years in this regard:
What does “the economy” mean here, though? I appreciate Bloomberg’s use of simple forms to break down complex issues here – no need to complicate an already complicated issue any further. Through small multiples, we see that voters are divided on whose plans are preferable for different facets of the economy:
It seems that, because the economy is a multifaceted issue that each candidate plans to approach in myriad different ways, people are more divided. We can really see this in the notable “neither” group for each of these issues, which has declined over time as people get to know candidates better and make up their minds. Including the “other” group really helps us make sense of this data!
In summary:
Past is prologue
A major part of election coverage is focusing on surprising or close races from recent cycles. This WaPo article highlights places to watch in 2024 across several swing states. They include maps of the area, how they voted in the past three presidential elections, the margin by which the victor won, and more information about why this area is so important in order to win that state.
Adding a level of analysis on top of maps and statistics in these brief sections breaks up the information in a nice, digestible way. There’s also something calming about using illustrations of candidates instead of photos…maybe it softens the existing impressions we have of each candidate.
Tomorrow, we’ll wrap up this series with a look at visualizations of down-ballot races, possible electoral scenarios, and, well, math.
If you haven’t already, make sure you’re registered to vote and have a plan for Election Day. See you tomorrow!