FiveThirtyEight: Over the Decades, How States Have Shifted

Mike Bostock of D3 fame is basically unrivaled in data visualization using HTML, SVG, and JS:<p><a href="http://bost.ocks.org/mike/" rel="nofollow">http://bost.ocks.org/mike/</a><p>Most of the code is open source, too:<p><a href="https://github.com/mbostock" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/mbostock</a><p>Awesome that he's working at the NYT alongside people like Nate Silver.

It would be awesome if this could somehow incorporate relative positions of the parties over time, perhaps by 'waving' the center line left-right as well. For example it could be argued that republicans during Nixon's time were closer to middle of the road democrats of today in terms of overall platform.

I am always astonished by what an outlier DC is.

This is an amazing data visualization for historic data. Very interesting to see how the states shifted over time. California was solidly GOP before Clinton, how did they lose to Democrat afterward?

Really interesting to see that the states weren't as split in most elections pre-Bush Sr.

It's not surprising to see the swaying support from citizens. What I'm curious about is given its a mixed economy and given the scale of the government (making change difficult), how much variability/difference is there between what the two parties can accomplish?<p>I wouldn't be surprised to see that difference is quite narrow (10%). Although it's hard to quantify this stuff.

I would love to be able to switch to a visualization where each state is tracked by color according to how it votes <i>now</i>. (Or even better, starting at a random date.) That would make the great long-term swap between Republicans and Democrats much more obvious.<p>Yes, we can mouse-over. But you can't easily mouse-over, scroll, and keep the mouse-over going.

Can somebody from the US please tell me what the deal with the District of Columbia (on the far left) is?<p>Also, this is another darn fine visualisation from the NYT.

The NYT does great visualizations but wow, they need some serious front end performance work. 34 stylesheets, 22 JS files, multiple inline blocks of CSS and JS. It must take forever to load in older versions of IE and on mobile devices.

Of course, none of this actually matters anymore. The corporo-verlords have bought both parties. The only way is parliamentary system with proportional representation. This isn't a political statement, just that hackers should investigate how to hack the system into that form. One clever hack is being done by John Koza (inventor of genetic programming) to do away with the electoral college <a href="http://www.nationalpopularvote.com/pages/about.php" rel="nofollow">http://www.nationalpopularvote.com/pages/about.php</a> . Some more hacking is needed.