| | An Election Day edition of Data&Eggs |
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Election season is a busy time for anyone who works with data and this is an especially intense season to be watching polls, forecasts, and voting results. This is the first midterm of President Trump’s second term, and control of both chambers of Congress is on the ballot: forecasters give Democrats strong odds of winning the House, while the Senate, where Democrats need to flip four seats to take control, is close to a coin toss.
In this issue, we're highlighting five pre-election graphics that did one of two things: 1) some took a simple chart, used it really well and put their own twist on it, and 2) others layered a combination of techniques and got us to question our assumptions.
Our picks: |
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A quiz that makes you guess until you get it right
We love that this piece layers several techniques: a map, a quiz and a beeswarm. Unless you're steeped in electoral demographics, you're likely to get some of the answers in this quiz wrong. This piece makes an interesting choice: You can't move on until you get it right, which is a design decision that makes you engage deeply with the story. The answer gives you a beeswarm to reinforce what you just learned. Adding one visualization at time is another choice that aids in understanding — throwing everything onto one screen would create a more overwhelming experience.
We won't spoil it for you, but we walked away knowing which voters, in which kinds of places, could swing the House this year, and they aren't who most people picture. |
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Faces on a treemap show how much of the money comes from a few people
We loved the simplicity and elegance of using a treemap to visualize campaign contributions—a classic election story more often told with a table or bar chart. A treemap answers a simple question: how do the parts add up to the whole? Each box is sized by its share, and compared to pie charts, they're far more precise and can accommodate more parts.
Fun fact about when the treemap was invented: In 1990, Ben Shneiderman's lab at the University of Maryland had a single 80-megabyte hard disk shared by 14 people, and it kept filling up, so he developed the treemap as a way to see at a glance who was taking up the space.
The Post’s treemap does something similar: each box is sized by the donor's share of contributions, but the twist is that each box is also filled with that donor's face. The effect is immediate. Elon Musk's face ($369 million) eats up nearly a quarter of the $1.54 billion on the Republican side. You grasp how much of that money comes from just one person. It's a smart take on a familiar chart. |
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| \n\n | A forecast that shows why each Senate race sways the way it does
We picked The Economist's prediction model because it's a chart that \"shows the work.\" A forecast combines polling with each state's voting history, the national environment, fundraising, scandals, and the candidates' ideology and experience; then runs simulated elections to estimate how often each side wins.
This simple step chart gives you a succinct view of the factors pushing and pulling the Economist's model to its final conclusion.
A few other forecasts (are there more this year than usual or is that just our impression?) with different approaches to \"showing your work\": G. Elliott Morris's Senate simulator (set the effects yourself); ElectIt from Danny Ebanks, Jonathan N. Katz, and Gary King at Harvard (judge the model against historical results). |
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Call each race and map your own path to a Senate majority
The Senate race is going to be tight, and playing this game shows you what’s at stake. You get to draft your own Senate by dragging each state to the Democratic or Republican side to see whether your picks add up to a majority.
What's clever about the design of this game is that the context you learn through the intro (incumbent party, 2024 margin, Cook Political Report rating) sticks with you as you try to sort states into either side. You can reference what you just learned as you make a decision, which reinforces and complicates your thinking. Sometimes the best way to learn something is through a game. |
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See how 2,176 suspected noncitizen voters shrink to one ballot
In 2024, Iowa officials said they had found 2,176 suspected noncitizens on their voter rolls. As you scroll, the Times' ballot stacks shrink to 277 after a check against a federal database, then to 11 people charged with voting illegally in a recent election, and finally to one person facing charges for voting in the 2024 general election. If he is convicted, his ballot would be one of more than 1.6 million cast.
This is a essentially stack of ballots as a bar chart, and it does what a bar chart does: it makes you compare sizes. But when we’re talking about one in 1.6 million, the scrollytelling does a lot of heavy lifting to make you feel how small, and how irrelevant, noncitizen voting is to the outcome of an election. |
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And one pick from Data & Eggs readers
A quiz about parking in Philadelphia from Levi Jiang at the Philadelphia Inquirer, featuring SVG illustrations, an interactive parking meter and a shift into night mode.
Says the submitter: “It could've been a boring and old-school coverage, but the game design made it fun to explore.”
We’re putting together a round-up of our favorite visualizations from 2026 next month, so send us your submissions here. |
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| Know other standout data storytelling projects? Submit a project to Data&Eggs. |
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| | \n\n | | Explore more standout data storytelling. |
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| If you care about visual decisions that shape understanding, charts that communicate a message and about pushing this craft forward, you’re in the right place. Browse our collection of 200+ projects and counting. |
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| | | | | | What’s Up at
The DataFace |
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Our Storytelling Studio’s work continues to win press for clients. Our analysis of how tariffs are testing independent retailers ran as a full-length feature in Vogue Business, and Men’s Fitness cited our recent research report research with Truemed. For Halloween, we worked with Instacart on their Sweet Tooth report, which was cited by a variety of local media outlets.
On the agency side, we’re continuing to add new data, charts and features to PopHIVE, Yale’s public health data platform. In September, PopHIVE was announced as one of the new Commitments to Action at the Clinton Global Initiative’s 2026 Annual Meeting.
That's it for now! See you next month.
Data&Eggs is a monthly newsletter from The DataFace. If someone forwarded this to you, subscribe here.
—The Data&Eggs Team eggs.thedataface.com
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| | | | | | | | | Created with ❤️ by data
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