This data visualization piece on the recent US presidential election was made using wood, string, and nails. I chose Pennsylvania since it was the last state to be called before most networks projected Joe Biden to be the President Elect.

    The data is true to scale with orange string for 67 counties, purple string for the population, blue string for percentage of Biden votes, and the red string for Trump votes.

    I wanted to explore how the population of each county affected the voting results as well as how many counties actually favored Biden. While Biden won in this state, I found that most counties actually favored Trump but the few very populated ones compensated for that by favoring Biden.

    While the piece is technically factually accurate, it is not very readable as the main goal was to make something visually pleasing out of the insane amount of data coming in and out during the past few weeks. It was therapeutic to make something out of all the chaos. I did not want to make something that would be quickly associated with a traditional graph. Something that inspired me was what Paula Scher said about her painted maps, “it’s not factual, it’s emotional”. See part one and two of the 2020 election series.