The data we are using comprises of Presidential Candidates as well as candidates fighting for House and Senate seats in the Parliament. Our goal here is to analyze the election results based on different states across the United States to get a deeper understanding of the 2016 elections.
The Choropleth Map below shows the distribution of voters across the United States of America in 2016 elections. It is difficult to contemplate the map based on number of voters as the overall voting population varies from state to state. To get a better understanding of the voting population, the Chloropleth Map shows the voting percentage for different states across US where Blue being the highest voting percentage and Red being the lowest.
From the Map, we can see that Minnesota has the highest voting percentage which is 74.7% as compared to Hawaii with a voting percentage of 43.2%. Other states which follow Minnesota are Maine, New Hampshire and Colorado with a voting percentage of 72.9%, 72.5% and 71.9% respectively.
The Candidates can be divided into 3 broad categories such as Incumbent, Challenger and Open. Candidates which are already in power and hold a seat in the parliament are known as Incumbent. Candidates who does not have any seat in the parliament but wish to replace those who are already in power are known as Challenger. Those who does not fall in either of the categories are categorized as Open.
The Chart below shows the number of Incumbent, Challenger and Open candidates across different states of US. It can be seen from the chart that the number of challengers are always greater than the number of Incumbents. For instance, California has 90 Challengers as compared to 48 Incumbents and 59 candidates fighting for Open seats. Similarly, in Florida, the number of Incumbent, Challenger and open candidates are 20, 77 and 74 respectively.
The Column chart here represents the number of candidates from different political parties spread across the United States.
From the chart, we can see that California(197) has the highest number of candidates followed by Florida(171), Texas(118) and New York(99).
We can also see that most of the candidates are from either the Democratic Party or from the Republican Party. We can filter out the chart by party names.
When we filter out the data for Democratic Party, we see that California has the highest number of candidates which is 90 followed by Florida and New York with number candidates 66 and 50 respectively.
When we filter out the data for the Republican Party, we see that most of the candidates are from California(85) followed by Florida(83) and Texas(68).
From the chart, we can easily that Republican Party won most of the house seats followed by the Democratic Party.
Republican Party won 238 seats whereas Democratic Party won 193 seats.
As we know, the Democratic Party and the Republican Party are the two most popular parties in the United States. The adjacent column chart represents the number of winning candidates from both the parties from different states.
The candidates from the Democratic Party won the maximum number of seats from California(39) followed by New York(18) and Illinois(18).
On the other hand, candidates from the Republican Party won the maximum number of seats from Texas(24) followed by Florida(17) and Pennsylvania(14).
Since the number of votes tells us about the influence of a candidate over its people, and also about the fate of the political career of that candidate, the chart shows the maximum number of votes cast by the people in favor of the candidate from the two leading political parties.
For the Republican Party, Rutherford, John from Jacksonville, Florida, managed to acquire 286,018 votes, which are the maximum number of votes among candidates from the Republican Party.
For the Democratic Party, Evans, Dwight from Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, managed to acquire 310,770 votes, which are the maximum number of votes among candidates from the Democratic Party.
Data sources:
Data visualization platforms:
Flourish
Datawrapper
References: