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Your charts need the gift of purpose

Via Twitter, I received this chart:


My readers are nailing it when it comes to finding charts that deserve close study. On Twitter, the conversation revolved around the inversion of the horizontal axis. Favorability is associated with positive numbers, and unfavorability with negative numbers, and so, it seems the natural ordering should be to place Favorable on the right and Unfavorable on the left.

Ordinarily, I'd have a problem with the inversion but here, the designer used the red-orange color scheme to overcome the potential misconception. It's hard to imagine that orange would be the color of disapproval, and red, of approval!

I am more concerned about a different source of confusion. Take a look at the following excerpt:

Wp_favorability_overall inset

If you had to guess, what are the four levels of favorability? Using the same positive-negative scale discussed above, most of us will assume that going left to right, we are looking at Strongly Favorable, Favorable, Unfavorable, Strongly Unfavorable. The people in the middle are neutrals and the people on the edages are extremists.

But we'd be mistaken. The order going left to right is Favorable, Strongly Favorable, Strongly Unfavorable, Unfavorable. The designer again used tints and shades to counter our pre-conception. This is less successful because the order defies logic. It is a double inversion.

The other part of the chart I'd draw attention to is the column of data printed on the right. Each such column is an act of giving up - the designer admits he or she couldn't find a way to incorporate that data into the chart itself. It's like a footnote in a book. The problem arises because such a column frequently contains very important information. On this chart, the data are "net favorable" ratings, the proportion of Favorables minus the proportion of Unfavorables, or visually, the length of the orange bar minus the length of the red bar.

The net rating is a succinct way to summarize the average sentiment of the population. But it's been banished to a footnote.


Anyone who follows American politics a little in recent years recognizes the worsening polarization of opinions. A chart showing the population average is thus rather meaningless. I'd like to see the above chart broken up by party affiliation (Republican, Independent, Democrat).

This led me to the original source of the chart. It turns out that the data came from a Fox News poll but the chart was not produced by Fox News - it accompanied this Washington Post article. Further, the article contains three other charts, broken out by party affiliation, as I hoped. The headline of the article was "Bernie Sanders remains one of the most popular politicians..."

But reading three charts, printed vertically, is not the simplest matter. One way to make it easier is to gift the chart a purpose. It turns out there are no surprises among the Republican and Democratic voters - they are as polarized as one can imagine. So the real interesting question in this data is the orientation of the Independent voters - are they more likely to side with Democrats or Republicans?

Good house-keeping means when you acquire stuff, you must remove other stuff. After adding the party dimension, it makes more sense to collapse the favorability dimension - precisely by using the net favorable rating column:







I have a different solution for incorporating the 'banished footnote'. As the sentiment is already color coded, there is no need to anchor the bars to the centerline. Move the origin of each row (the point at which orange is to the left and red to the right) to the left or right the amount dictated by the footnote, and draw a vertical line to act as the origin for a new axis at which the average sentiment is neutral / 0. I agree the strong strong feelings should be on the outside edges.

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