Whither the youth vote

The youth turnout is something that politicians and pundits bring up constantly when talking about the current U.S. presidential primaries. So I decided to look for the data. I found some data at the United States Election Project, a site maintained by Dr. Michael McDonald. The key chart is this one:

This is classic Excel.

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Here is a quick fix:

The key to the fix is to recognize the structure of the data.

The sawtooth pattern displayed in the original chart does not convey any real trends - it's an artifact that many people only turn out for presidential elections. (As a result, the turnout during presidential election years is driven by the general election turnout.)

The age groups have an order so instead of four different colors, use a progressive color scheme. This is one of the unspoken rules about color usage in data visualization, featured in my Long Read article.

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What do I learn from this turnout by age group chart?

Younger voters are much more invested in presidential elections than off-year elections. The youth turnout for presidential elections is double that for other years.

Participation increased markedly in the 2018 mid-term elections across all four age groups, reflecting the passion for or against President Donald Trump. This was highly unusual - and in fact, the turnout for that off-year is closer to the turnout of a presidential year election. Whether the turnout will stay at this elevated level is a big question for 2022!

For presidential elections, turnout has been creeping up over time for all age groups. But the increase in 2016 (Hillary Clinton vs Donald Trump) was mild. The growth in participation is more noticable in the younger age groups, including in 2016.

Let's look at the relative jumps in 2018 (right side of the left chart). The younger the age group, the larger the jump. Turnout in the 18-29 group doubled to 32 percent. Turnout in the oldest age group increased by 20%, nothing to sneeze at but less impressive than in the younger age groups.

Why this is the case should be obvious. The 60+ age group has a ceiling. It's already at 60-70%; how much higher can it go? People at that age have many years to develop their preference for voting in elections. It would be hard to convince the holdouts (hideouts?) to vote.

The younger age groups are further from the ceiling. If you're an organizer, will you focus your energy on the 60% non-voting 18-29-years-old, or the 30% non-voting 60+ years-old? [This is the same question any business faces: do you win incremental sales from your more loyal customers, hoping they would spend even more, or your less loyal customers?]

For Democratic candidates, the loss in 2016 is hanging over them. Getting the same people to vote in 2020 as in 2016 is a losing hand. So, they need to expand the base somehow.

If you're a candidate like Joe Biden who relies on the 60+ year old bloc, it's hard to see where he can expand the base. Your advantage is that the core voter bloc is reliable. Your problem is that you don't have appeal to the younger age groups. So a viable path to winning in the general election has to involve flipping older Trump voters. The incremental ex-Trump voters have to offset the potential loss in turnout from younger voters.

If you're a candidate like Bernie Sanders who relies on the youth vote, you'd want to launch a get-out-the-vote effort aimed at younger voters. A viable path can be created by expanding the base through lifting the turnout rate of younger voters. The incremental young voters have to offset the fraction of the 60+ year old bloc who flip to Trump.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Bad data leave chart hanging by the thread

IGNITE National put out a press release saying that Gen Z white men are different from all other race-gender groups because they are more likely to be or lean Republican. The evidence is in this chart:

Or is it?

Following our Trifecta Checkup framework (link), let's first look at the data. White men is the bottom left group. Democratic = 42%, Independent = 28%, Republican = 48%. That's a total of 118%. Unfortunately, this chart construction error erases the message. We don't know which of the three columns were incorrectly sized, or perhaps the data were incorrectly weighted so that the error is spread out between the three columns.

But the story of the graphic is hanging by the thread - the gap between Democratic and Republican lean amongst white men is 6 percent, which is smaller than the data error of 10 percent. I sent them a tweet asking for a correction. Will post the corrected version if they respond.

Update: The thread didn't break. They replied quickly and issued the following corrected chart:

Now, the data for white men are: Democratic = 35%, Independent = 22%; Republican = 40%. Roughly 7% shift for each party affilitation so they may have just started the baseline at the wrong level when inverting the columns.

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The Visual design also has some problems. I am not a fan of inverting columns. In fact, column inversion may be the root of the error above.

Let me zoom in on the white men columns. (see right)

Without looking at the legend, can you guess which color is Democratic, Independent or Republican? Go ahead and take your best guess.

For me, I think red is Republican (by convention), then white is Independent (a neutral color) which means yellow is Democratic.

Here is the legend:

So I got the yellow and white reversed. And that is another problem with the visual design. For a chart that shows two-party politics in the U.S., there is really no good reason to deviate from the red-blue convention. The color for Independents doesn't matter since it would be understood that the third color would represent them.

If the red-blue convention were followed, readers do not need to consult the legend.

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In my Long Read article at DataJournalism.com, I included an "unspoken rule" about color selection: use the natural color mapping whenever possible. Go here to read about this and other rules.

The chart breaks another one of the unspoken conventions. When making a legend, place it near the top of the chart. Readers need to know the color mapping before they can understand the chart.

In addition, you want the reader's eyes to read the legend in the same way they read the columns. The columns goes left to right from Democratic to Independent to Republican. The legend should do the same!

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Here is a quick re-do that fixes the visual issues (except the data error). It's an Excel chart but it doesn't have to be bad.

 

Pie chart conventions

I came across this pie chart from a presentation at an industry meeting some weeks ago:

This example breaks a number of the unspoken conventions on making pie charts and so it is harder to read than usual.

Notice that the biggest slice starts around 8 o'clock, and the slices are ordered alphabetically by the label, rather than numerically by size of the slice.

The following is the same chart ordered in a more conventional way. The largest slice is placed along the top vertical, and the other slices are arranged in a clock-wise manner from larger to smaller.

This version is easier to read because the reader does not need to think about the order of the slices. The expectation of decreasing size is met.

The above pie chart, though, reveals breaking of another convention. The colors on this chart signify nothing! The general rule is color differences should encode data differences. Here, the colors should go from deepest to lightest. (One can even argue that different tinges is redundant.)

You see how this version is even better. In the previous version, the colors are distracting. You're wondering what they mean, and then you realize they signify nothing.

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As designers of graphics, we follow a bunch of conventions silently. When a design deviates from it, it's harder to understand.

Recently, I wrote a long article for DataJournalism.com, setting out many of these unspoken conventions. Read it here.

 

Too many colors on a chart is bad, but why?

The following chart is bad, but how so?

The chart is annoying because of the misuse of colors.

What is the purpose of the multiple colors used in this chart? It's not encoding any data. Colors are used here to differentiate one bar from its two neighbors. Or perhaps to make the chart more "appealing".

The reason why the coloring scheme backfires is that readers may look for meaning in the colors. What's common between Iceland, United States and Germany for them to be assigned green? What about Japan, New Zealand, Spain and France, all of which shown yellow?

The readers' instinct is driven by a set of unspoken rules that govern the production of data visualization. Specifically, the rule here is: color differences reflect data differences. When such a rule is violated, the reader is misled and confused.

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For more about this rule, other rules related to making bar charts, and other other rules for making data graphics, please read my Long Read article, here.

 

How to read this chart about coronavirus risk

In my just-published Long Read article at DataJournalism.com, I touched upon the subject of "How to Read this Chart".

Most data graphics do not come with directions of use because dataviz designers follow certain conventions. We do not need to tell you, for example, that time runs left to right on the horizontal axis (substitute right to left for those living in right-to-left countries). It's when we deviate from the norms that calls for a "How to Read this Chart" box.

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A discussion over Twitter during the weekend on the following New York Times chart perfectly illustrates this issue. (The article is well worth reading to educate oneself on this red-hot public-health issue. I made some comments on the sister blog about the data a few days ago.)

Reading this chart, I quickly grasp that the horizontal axis is the speed of infection and the vertical axis represents the deadliness. Without being told, I used the axis labels (and some of you might notice the annotations with the arrows on the top right.) But most people will likely miss - at a glance - that the vertical axis utilizes a log scale while the horizontal axis is linear (regular).

The effect of a log scale is to pull the large numbers toward the average while spreading the smaller numbers apart - when compared to a linear scale. So when we look at the top of the coronavirus box, it appears that this virus could be as deadly as SARS.

The height of the pink box is 3.9, while the gap between the top edge of the box and the SARS dot is 6. Yet our eyes tell us the top edge is closer to the SARS dot than it is to the bottom edge!

There is nothing inaccurate about this chart - the log scale introduces such distortion. The designer has to make a choice.

Indeed, there were two camps on Twitter, arguing for and against the log scale.

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I use log scales a lot in analyzing data, but tend not to use log scales in a graph. It's almost a given that using the log scale requires a "How to Read this Chart" message. And the NY Times crew delivers!

Right below the chart is a paragraph:

To make this even more interesting, the horizontal axis is a hidden "log" scale. That's because infections spread exponentially. Even though the scale is not labeled "log", think as if the large values have been pulled toward the middle.

Here is an over-simplified way to see this. A disease that spreads at a rate of fifteen people at a time is not 3 times worse than one that spreads five at a time. In the former case, the first sick person transmits it to 15, and then each of the 15 transmits the flu to 15 others, thus after two steps, 241 people have been infected (225 + 15 + 1). In latter case, it's 5x5 + 5 + 1 = 31 infections after two steps. So at this point, the number of infected is already 8 times worse, not 3 times. And the gap keeps widening with each step.

P.S. See also my post on the sister blog that digs deeper into the metrics.