The New York Times's Sahil Chinoy
explores which factors—education, religion, race/ethnicity—are more predictive of party affiliation. The first visual is a short quiz that reveals the political leanings of people like you. Men like me—white, straight, with a college degree, and no religion—favor the Democratic party by a margin of 48 points:
Chinoy's
project is another example of
“me” layer at work: if you want to interest readers, open up your story by showing them how the numbers relate to them, why they matter, or let each of them see where
they are in the data. Then proceed to provide detail and context.
The large diagram below summarizes the forking paths; the story points out that recent polarization has been accompanied with an increasing demographic homogenization of the parties.
Interesting fact: If you're white, it doesn't matter much which religion you profess, but how religious you are:
Chinoy
has mentioned where he got inspiration from: this
project by
The Economist, and this
decision tree by Amanda Cox. Well done.
(
Update: the print version of the piece appeared yesterday; click to expand):
