Nate Silver and the team at FiveThirtyEight are among the best at analyzing and visualizing data. I check them out for their prognostications and forecasts for politics, sports, and economics - as well as their amazing graphics. With the mid-term elections right around the corner, it is interesting to see what their models are predicting and how they are presenting those findings.
Here is the latest forecast (Nov. 1 at 11:48 AM) for the U.S. House of Representatives. Regardless if your "tribe" is projected to pick up or lose seats, this graphic is an excellent example of how to visually display and interact with data.
Everything is right about how this information is displayed. In fact, I believe this graphic is right up there with Charles Joseph Minard's graphic that portrays the losses suffered by Napoleon's army in the Russian campaign of 1812. (Made famous by Edward Tufte in his seminal book The Visual Display of Quantitative Information - read it, learn it, live it.)
Now I don't think the Republicans will fare as poorly as the French army did, but I do think there is as much to learn and admire in the FiveThirtyEight chart as there is in Minard's masterpiece.
The key takeaway is shown in large blue numbers for the Democrats and in large red numbers for the Republicans. FiveThirtyEight is forecasting a 6 in 7 chance the Democrats will win enough seats to take control of the House, while there is a 1 in 7 chance the Republicans will retain the House.
The histogram shows the probability (y-axis) of the number of seats (x-axis) for each party. The magnitude of the forecasted change is established by the vertical line showing the current breakdown (over on the right side of the graph - how perfect is that?). You can also clearly see the average expected gain of +38 seats for the Democrats, along with the range of expected pick ups (+19 to +59) for the Democrats with an 80% probability.
Oh, by the way, this is an interactive graphic. When you mouse over the histogram on the FiveThirtyEight site the probability and corresponding number of seats changes. Brilliant!!
Well, I hope your team wins on Tuesday. But even if they don't, the country (and your business) will be a better place with great charts like this one.