This month, I set out to take political data and build an interactive visualization.

First, I gathered data from different sources and manipulated them in R.

I identified R Shiny as my visualization platform and was ready to complete my challenge. But then… I hit massive roadblocks. I got tied down in the nitty-gritty of Shiny syntax and couldn’t get my visualization to publish. I was losing track of the insight I wanted to provide. I was losing my mind.

Then I realized, what if I just took my R data frame, exported it, and put it into Tableau? That was not what I set out to do, but it would still be impactful.

That’s what I did. I downloaded Tableau Public, which is free up to 10GB of storage, and published my dashboard here. It looks at voter turnout across different variable groups, with the same variable groups serving as filters.

A few cool findings:

• Registered Democrats represented by Republicans (in Congress) turned out at higher rates than those represented by Democrats (~87 percent vs ~86 percent). This makes sense as they would be more fired up to vote.
• Independent (non-party affiliated) voters turned out at much lower rates than party-affiliated voters. Independents turned out at ~36 percent, while both Democrats and Republicans turned out at ~86 percent). Those who select a party are more loyal and invested in the process.
• Older and wealthier voters turned out at much higher rates. Those in a zip code with average income of $100k or more voted at 67 percent, while those in zip codes of average income of $50k or less voted at 51 percent. Seniors voted at a rate of 77 percent, while under-30’s voted at a rate of 32 percent.

Overall, this was a very insightful month and I’m glad I got to work through all this.