Visualization of U.S presidents' approval ratings

I think there are one too many dimensions to this data. I know they collect statistics on both approval and disapproval, but for the most part approval + disapproval = constant, so I think it would be more informative to simply plot something like (approval - disapproval) on the y-axis and time on the x-axis. Then you could see the trends and compare different presidents without having to watch the animation once for each president and then trying to remember where that president went while you're watching the next one so you can compare them.

Funny how time can sometimes heals all wounds. Contrast Truman's approval ranking on the graph from the OP's post with his aggregate ranking in this table from Wikipedia, where he is ranked in the first quartile.<p><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Historical_rankings_of_Presidents_of_the_United_States" rel="nofollow">http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Historical_rankings_of_Presiden...</a>

Depressing... Watching the consistent motions, I think this says more about the people than it says about their presidents.

The interface is pretty nice. Why are you plotting approval vs disapproval? These aren't independent quantities... I'm sure there is a better way to relate these two.

It would be helpful if impossible points were the background colour (for example, 60/50 or 50/60, 40/70 or 70/40, etc) so that the big mass of whitespace is less distracting and it is more evident when neutral people shifted to one opinion or if people flip-flopped.

The problem with this visualization is that you've got X/Y being disapproval / approval. The only case when they're not correlated is during the first few days of entering office.<p>There might be a less confusing way to display the data.

Fascinating (and strangely inspiring) that after ~550 days in office, every single president on the chart had the explicit disapproval of at least(!) 16% of the country.

Thanks for this. The animation is interesting. Ping pong Truman, for example. Learned some things too, like that LBJ finished up worse off the Nixon did.

This appears to be totally broken in Firefox (9.0.1, on Linux)... don't know what's up with that.

I'd like to see the same thing with congress's approval ratings broken down by member of congress.