Transcript
Speaker: Welcome back to the Policy Viz Podcast. I'm your host, John Schwabisch. Hope you're well. Weather here has gotten a little bit chillier in late October here in Washington, DC, but we continue with the podcast nonetheless, because that's an indoor activity. So no problem.
Speaker: This is one of these intervening episodes on my favorite graphs. And because we are getting closer to election day here in the US, I thought I would focus our attention on an election day visualization. One of my favorites. from Mike Bostock and Sean Carter. The first one published in November of 2012. If you're on YouTube, you can watch me play around with it. If not, I'll put the link in the show notes to the audio and you can take a look at it yourself. Let me describe it. 512 paths to the White House. This is the Barack Obama-Mitt Romney election in 2012.
Speaker: ah The title here 512 pass to the White House select a winner and the most competitive states below to see all the paths to victory available for either candidate and so we have a number of um Competitive states that the two candidates were vying for and little ah quaint almost as it were, but you can see how how much the world has changed. The U.S. Electoral College has changed here from 2012. Here are the competitive states back in 2012. Florida, Ohio, North Carolina, Virginia, Wisconsin, Colorado, Iowa, Nevada, and New Hampshire. So that map has certainly changed as we get into the midterms here in 2026. But We start here with um basically every state has two as a toggle. You pick the Democrat or the Republican. And below that starts what is a lovely Sankey diagram.
Speaker: And so in the blue text on the left, it says Obama has 430 way weight 431 ways to win and on the right it says Romney has 76 ways to win and right in the middle in yellow is five ties. And this is just a Sankey diagram that branches out so that if Obama wins Florida or Romney wins Florida, then Obama, if he wins Florida, needed to just win Ohio. But if he wins Florida and loses Ohio, then he could win North Carolina. And so it branches off into all of these combinations, which itself is really interesting. And you could hover over each of these branches to see what would happen. For example, if you thought Romney would win Florida and win Ohio, um then if Obama wins North Carolina and Wisconsin, Obama would win. And so it's all these combinations, which is how you get, of course, to the 512 paths. And that's just hovering over the branches. But we could also select...
Speaker: our, our, our expectations as it were. So if we say that Florida will go for a Republican, then the Sankey diagram shortens up because that row in the Sankey is eliminated and we could go back and forth. Doesn't have to be in order, which is nice. If we're more convinced or sure that Obama, for example, is going to win Virginia and Wisconsin, then we could select those States. and we can figure out what the remaining possibilities are. And so it tells you each of these opportunities or each of these combinations. So if Obama, for example, were to win Virginia and Wisconsin, then next thing I'd pick were Romney to win Florida, then ah Obama would need to win Ohio. Okay, so let's continue this. Let's say ah Romney won Ohio. Well, now Obama could still win if he wins North Carolina. Let's put that into Romney's camp. And then we have all these combinations. So why do I love this piece? A few reasons. One is that I think it might be the first time I saw a Sankey diagram
Speaker: Not just in an interactive way, though it might be, and not just vertically, which I think was was fairly rare. Even today, they're usually shown left to right, showing flows going left to right. So the vertical orientation was new. But also the fact, not just the interactivity in the sense that you could hover or click,
Speaker: but that it allowed you to do your own calculations, as it were, allowed you to put in your own projections, your own expectations, your own beliefs about what was going to happen to the election. And so this is, in my memory at least, now 2012, so 14 years later,
Speaker: This is one of the first pieces I remember being online where I could really personalize my experience, right? Because I'm putting in my expectations or my hopes or my beliefs about what would happen in the election. And you can keep toggling between all these different options so that you could figure out what the combinations would be for these two candidates in these two races. And so if you started with going left to right, Florida, Ohio, North Carolina,
Speaker: and then continued, that's one way to address this, but you could also start on the right end or right in the middle or mix and match. You could vary your experience with the visualization itself based on your confidence of the result. And so what's also nice about it is that, and I'm gonna reset it here while i'm while I'm playing around with it, What's also nice is that it started with Florida. Now, I believe this is sorted left to right, also top to bottom, same order of each state, by a number of electoral votes, which which I think makes sense, right?
Speaker: So once you select the state, it removes itself from the visualization. So once I select Florida, the entire visualization changes so that Ohio is now at the top. It's the state with the next largest number of electoral votes. And so it guides you through all of these different selections um for Obama and for Romney, but by the number of electoral votes of each state. And the interactivity is very simple, very straightforward. It's a binary toggle Democrat Republican for each of these nine states. The interactivity allows you to see what the different combinations would be and the highlighting works really well. So this is one of my favorite pieces for elections. If I have
Speaker: Time, patience, willingness to put myself out there. We'll talk about the New York Times needle. But for now, this is what I'm focused on. This is one of my favorites. I don't think they do this anymore for elections. I don't know why. i think it's a great piece. But 512 passed the White House from the New York Times. Make sure you check it out. I'll put the link in the show notes. And I hope you will enjoy this visualization project as well.
Speaker: So until next time, this has been the Policy Viz Podcast. Thanks so much for listening.
