I recently visited the Phillips
Collection gallery here in DC and saw the work of one of my favorite artists:
Camille Pissarro. In one of his paintings, The Seine Valley at Les Damps, he uses
an impasto technique in the clouds with bold, hatch brushstrokes. I wanted to
try re-create this hatch effect in a viz.
This viz shows how every state
voted in the Presidential election since 1964. Each mark is a state where the
angle is the degree to which they voted democrat (left) or republican (right).
The sharper the angle the more heavily they voted for one party. The thickness
of the mark is how many people voted and the color is which party won the
state. I didn't quite achieve the effect I wanted but am happy with the
result nonetheless. See findings below.
As you can
see party shifts were much more common in the past. In 1964, 45 states voted
for Johnson (Democrat) and in 1972, 49 states voted for Nixon (Republican).
However, since 2000 party shifts have been increasingly less likely. In the
past five elections only six states have voted with either party more than
once: Colorado, Florida, Iowa, Nevada, Ohio, and Virginia. Seemingly, political division and
entrenchment are up.
