Hacker News Reader

Hacker News

Comment by dewitt | Hacker News Reader

Full thread

dewitt

Mike Bostock of D3 fame is basically unrivaled in data visualization using HTML, SVG, and JS:

http://bost.ocks.org/mike/

Most of the code is open source, too:

https://github.com/mbostock

Awesome that he's working at the NYT alongside people like Nate Silver.

View on HN

I agree, this is a really, really cool visualization of something that would otherwise be rather difficult to understand. I've always known about the "Southern switch" but something like this really highlights it. Alabama in particular had a almost 83% change in the vote from 1960 to 1964 and a 73% swing back in 1968! It's also cool to see the slowly cyclical nature of the elections, although the wild swings from one party to another seem to have slowed down quite a bit.

The note to the left helps explain why Alabama was SO far to the right that year. LBJ wasn't even on the ballot in 64.

This is data visualization gone wrong. I am afraid you have drawn a wildly incorrect conclusion because the programmers were too lazy to deal with the political and historical inconvenience of Gov. George C. Wallace, the Southern Dixiecrat and presidential nominee of the American Independent Party. Alabama didn't suddenly take 73% a left turn to vote for LBJ's vice president in 1968; they, along with Mississippi, Louisiana, Georgia, and Arkansas, voted for George Wallace, a candidate who made Richard Nixon look like Bob Dylan in comparison. Get the facts:

http://uselectionatlas.org/RESULTS/national.php?year=1968...

The moral of the story (in my mind) is that while it's tempting to throw a big dataset into a cool visualization algorithm, if you're not careful about what each individual data point means, you might end up imparting more confusion and misconceptions than actual knowledge.

Great explanation. I saw that wild swing and when I hovered over and saw it was Alabama, I immediately said George Wallace. He might still be winning if health (and death) not got in the way. He even got around Alabama's consecutive term limits by having his wife elected governor.

Keep in mind that the parties used to stand for something different too. For example Strom Thurmond, a far-right-wing senator from South Carolina, was a Democrat until 1964.

Agreed. The southern democrats (otherwise known as dixiecrats) were the socially conservative, religiously motivated block, while the 'northern' republicans held social beliefs often associated with modern democrats.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com