I am in a public opinions class based around the 2016 election with Barry Hollander, so I am very familiar with fivethirtyeight.com. When I read the assignment, I immediately thought of an interactive, infographic-filled story on the forecast of the election. Because the story is made entirely up of infographics, I decided to choose two that really explained the current election in a matter of seconds.
This infographic shows the map of the US, colored in with states each candidate is predicted to win. We’ve all seen this map in practically every election story put out, but what I think confuses a lot of readers (including me) is how it seems like there could be so much red for Trump, and yet Hillary is still winning? Enter infographic #2…
This second infographic helped me to quickly understand and interpret the confusing message of the first, far more common infographic. This graphic, though wonky, is still a map, just laid out as an interpretive guide to electoral votes. By giving each state, no matter how big or small the same size vote, but showing how many votes each state is represented by, readers are able to see more definitively how a confusing concept like electoral votes matter to an election.
These infographic pieces use Tufte’s Principal of Integration of Evidence– including not only words, but images, interactives, diagrams, and symbolic representations of data.