6 ms·

Visualization of U.S presidents' approval ratings

59 points by wisp 15y ago

uiri 15y ago
It would be helpful if impossible points were the background colour (for example, 60/50 or 50/60, 40/70 or 70/40, etc) so that the big mass of whitespace is less distracting and it is more evident when neutral people shifted to one opinion or if people flip-flopped.
joshuahhh 15y ago
This appears to be totally broken in Firefox (9.0.1, on Linux)... don't know what's up with that.
- rcthompson 15y ago
  Works prefectly fine for me on FF 9.0.1 on Ubuntu.
joejohnson 15y ago
The interface is pretty nice. Why are you plotting approval vs disapproval? These aren't independent quantities... I'm sure there is a better way to relate these two.
- projectileboy 15y ago
  Approval + disapproval is almost always less than 100 in most polls.
  - joejohnson 15y ago
    Right, thus the dependence between the two quantities.
    - mbreese 15y ago
      Yeah, but these are the values that are measured with the polls. What other metric would you want to use that has been measured using the same way for all these presidents?
      - timr 15y ago
        To be fair, "approval" hasn't been measured the same way for all of these presidents. But to answer your question, I'd imagine that a plot of unemployment rate vs. approval rating would be quite enlightening.
    - greyhill 15y ago
      I think it's interesting that at the beginning of the Obama time series, his approval rating remains constant while his disapproval rating steadily increases. Assuming that "Approval + Disapproval = 1%" would lose that information. Maybe it would make more sense to show approval (or disapproval) and undecided?
      - ordinary 15y ago
        This seems to be happening with many presidents in their first 200 days. See Johnson, Eisenhower, Kennedy and Bush Sr. for examples. Also check out Nixon, who manages to go up on both metrics for the first 200 days. The numbers support this: on average, 32% of the population is neutral towards a newly elected president. After 200 days, this has gone down to 19%. The same numbers for approval ratings remain steady: from 64% to 63%, while those for disapproval necessarily go up: from 4% to 18%. This means that even the people who voted against the winning candidate (always between 40% and 60% of the turnout[0]) are initially mostly neutral towards them. But while the people who voted for him stay loyal for a bit (possible because they don't want to feel they've been deceived), the people who voted against him have no qualms about voicing their disapproval. I have to admit that this "let's wait and see" attitude was pretty surprising to me. It seems like people refrain from judging a president until after he has actually made policy, as opposed to immediately upon taking office, as I would have expected them to do.
- nkassis 15y ago
  Maybe approval visit year of election(or when the poll was taken) I think that would show a downward tendency.
- JohnnyBrown 15y ago
  Perhaps this would work: x-axis is time, y is approval/disapproval, width of line represents percent neutral. But then where's the excuse to play with the neat video library?
projectileboy 15y ago
Depressing... Watching the consistent motions, I think this says more about the people than it says about their presidents.
- rorrr 15y ago
  Or maybe that certain presidents make certain promises and then consistently break them. Obama has been very disappointing, I had high hopes for him.
  - pacomerh 15y ago
    You had high hopes, but with the last president not even hopes. It's totally different, what's worse? Cool graph though.
  - Terretta 15y ago
    Read this: http://www.thedailybeast.com/newsweek/2012/01/15/andrew-sullivan-how-obama-s-long-game-will-outsmart-his-critics.html http://www.thedailybeast.com/newsweek/2012/01/15/andrew-sull...
    - InclinedPlane 15y ago
      What's Obama's long game on signing NDAA 2012? There's no excuse for that.
      - wvenable 15y ago
        It's a budget bill; it gets enacted every year to fund the military. It must be signed eventually (and in this case, on the very last day). Blame your entire government for putting things like the infinite detention of citizens inside of a budget bill.
        rorrr 15y ago
        > It's a budget bill That got to be the stupidest excuse to introduce new horrible laws.
thomasgerbe 15y ago
Funny how time can sometimes heals all wounds. Contrast Truman's approval ranking on the graph from the OP's post with his aggregate ranking in this table from Wikipedia, where he is ranked in the first quartile. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Historical_rankings_of_Presidents_of_the_United_States http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Historical_rankings_of_Presiden...
pippy 15y ago
The problem with this visualization is that you've got X/Y being disapproval / approval. The only case when they're not correlated is during the first few days of entering office. There might be a less confusing way to display the data.
rcthompson 15y ago
I think there are one too many dimensions to this data. I know they collect statistics on both approval and disapproval, but for the most part approval + disapproval = constant, so I think it would be more informative to simply plot something like (approval - disapproval) on the y-axis and time on the x-axis. Then you could see the trends and compare different presidents without having to watch the animation once for each president and then trying to remember where that president went while you're watching the next one so you can compare them.
- xianshou 15y ago
  Actually, for several of the presidents, approval + disapproval != constant. For example, Obama moves straight right (up on disapproval) for his first 200 days before descending in approval. There seems to be a substantial difference between the effects of actions that anger some (presumably of the opposing party) and those that disappoint all.
  - mbostock 15y ago
    There's a good analysis of how to design a visualization that shows both approval and disapproval here: http://eagereyes.org/blog/2012/embracing-uncertainty-two-line-charts http://eagereyes.org/blog/2012/embracing-uncertainty-two-lin...
- redthrowaway 15y ago
  If you did that, though, you'd have to plot each president as a line. That's not necessarily a bad thing, but it's a different visualization entirely. This reminds me in many ways of Hans Rosling's TED talk on visualizing global health outcomes and other data: http://www.ted.com/talks/hans_rosling_shows_the_best_stats_you_ve_ever_seen.html http://www.ted.com/talks/hans_rosling_shows_the_best_stats_y...
- CWuestefeld 15y ago
  There's a problem, but not with the approval/disapproval axes. It's with the time axis. Note that we're looking at days 0 - 1,000, that is, less than a 3-year range. This completely overlooks the second term of 2-term presidents. So, for example, we're seeing GWB's post-9/11 boom but not his later ignominy, and we're not seeing Reagan after he got the economy sorted.
waterlesscloud 15y ago
Thanks for this. The animation is interesting. Ping pong Truman, for example. Learned some things too, like that LBJ finished up worse off the Nixon did.
epaga 15y ago
Fascinating (and strangely inspiring) that after ~550 days in office, every single president on the chart had the explicit disapproval of at least(!) 16% of the country.
maeon3 15y ago
I'd like to see the same thing with congress's approval ratings broken down by member of congress.

59 points by wisp 15y ago

uiri 15y ago

It would be helpful if impossible points were the background colour (for example, 60/50 or 50/60, 40/70 or 70/40, etc) so that the big mass of whitespace is less distracting and it is more evident when neutral people shifted to one opinion or if people flip-flopped.

joshuahhh 15y ago

This appears to be totally broken in Firefox (9.0.1, on Linux)... don't know what's up with that.

rcthompson 15y ago
Works prefectly fine for me on FF 9.0.1 on Ubuntu.

joejohnson 15y ago

The interface is pretty nice. Why are you plotting approval vs disapproval? These aren't independent quantities... I'm sure there is a better way to relate these two.

projectileboy 15y ago
Approval + disapproval is almost always less than 100 in most polls.
- joejohnson 15y ago
  Right, thus the dependence between the two quantities.
  - mbreese 15y ago
    Yeah, but these are the values that are measured with the polls. What other metric would you want to use that has been measured using the same way for all these presidents?
    - timr 15y ago
      To be fair, "approval" hasn't been measured the same way for all of these presidents. But to answer your question, I'd imagine that a plot of unemployment rate vs. approval rating would be quite enlightening.
  - greyhill 15y ago
    I think it's interesting that at the beginning of the Obama time series, his approval rating remains constant while his disapproval rating steadily increases. Assuming that "Approval + Disapproval = 1%" would lose that information. Maybe it would make more sense to show approval (or disapproval) and undecided?
    - ordinary 15y ago
      This seems to be happening with many presidents in their first 200 days. See Johnson, Eisenhower, Kennedy and Bush Sr. for examples. Also check out Nixon, who manages to go up on both metrics for the first 200 days. The numbers support this: on average, 32% of the population is neutral towards a newly elected president. After 200 days, this has gone down to 19%. The same numbers for approval ratings remain steady: from 64% to 63%, while those for disapproval necessarily go up: from 4% to 18%. This means that even the people who voted against the winning candidate (always between 40% and 60% of the turnout[0]) are initially mostly neutral towards them. But while the people who voted for him stay loyal for a bit (possible because they don't want to feel they've been deceived), the people who voted against him have no qualms about voicing their disapproval. I have to admit that this "let's wait and see" attitude was pretty surprising to me. It seems like people refrain from judging a president until after he has actually made policy, as opposed to immediately upon taking office, as I would have expected them to do.
nkassis 15y ago
Maybe approval visit year of election(or when the poll was taken) I think that would show a downward tendency.
JohnnyBrown 15y ago
Perhaps this would work: x-axis is time, y is approval/disapproval, width of line represents percent neutral. But then where's the excuse to play with the neat video library?

projectileboy 15y ago

Depressing... Watching the consistent motions, I think this says more about the people than it says about their presidents.

rorrr 15y ago
Or maybe that certain presidents make certain promises and then consistently break them. Obama has been very disappointing, I had high hopes for him.
- pacomerh 15y ago
  You had high hopes, but with the last president not even hopes. It's totally different, what's worse? Cool graph though.
- Terretta 15y ago
  Read this: http://www.thedailybeast.com/newsweek/2012/01/15/andrew-sullivan-how-obama-s-long-game-will-outsmart-his-critics.html http://www.thedailybeast.com/newsweek/2012/01/15/andrew-sull...
  - InclinedPlane 15y ago
    What's Obama's long game on signing NDAA 2012? There's no excuse for that.
    - wvenable 15y ago
      It's a budget bill; it gets enacted every year to fund the military. It must be signed eventually (and in this case, on the very last day). Blame your entire government for putting things like the infinite detention of citizens inside of a budget bill.
      - rorrr 15y ago
        > It's a budget bill That got to be the stupidest excuse to introduce new horrible laws.

thomasgerbe 15y ago

Funny how time can sometimes heals all wounds. Contrast Truman's approval ranking on the graph from the OP's post with his aggregate ranking in this table from Wikipedia, where he is ranked in the first quartile. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Historical_rankings_of_Presidents_of_the_United_States http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Historical_rankings_of_Presiden...

pippy 15y ago

The problem with this visualization is that you've got X/Y being disapproval / approval. The only case when they're not correlated is during the first few days of entering office. There might be a less confusing way to display the data.

rcthompson 15y ago

I think there are one too many dimensions to this data. I know they collect statistics on both approval and disapproval, but for the most part approval + disapproval = constant, so I think it would be more informative to simply plot something like (approval - disapproval) on the y-axis and time on the x-axis. Then you could see the trends and compare different presidents without having to watch the animation once for each president and then trying to remember where that president went while you're watching the next one so you can compare them.

xianshou 15y ago
Actually, for several of the presidents, approval + disapproval != constant. For example, Obama moves straight right (up on disapproval) for his first 200 days before descending in approval. There seems to be a substantial difference between the effects of actions that anger some (presumably of the opposing party) and those that disappoint all.
- mbostock 15y ago
  There's a good analysis of how to design a visualization that shows both approval and disapproval here: http://eagereyes.org/blog/2012/embracing-uncertainty-two-line-charts http://eagereyes.org/blog/2012/embracing-uncertainty-two-lin...
redthrowaway 15y ago
If you did that, though, you'd have to plot each president as a line. That's not necessarily a bad thing, but it's a different visualization entirely. This reminds me in many ways of Hans Rosling's TED talk on visualizing global health outcomes and other data: http://www.ted.com/talks/hans_rosling_shows_the_best_stats_you_ve_ever_seen.html http://www.ted.com/talks/hans_rosling_shows_the_best_stats_y...
CWuestefeld 15y ago
There's a problem, but not with the approval/disapproval axes. It's with the time axis. Note that we're looking at days 0 - 1,000, that is, less than a 3-year range. This completely overlooks the second term of 2-term presidents. So, for example, we're seeing GWB's post-9/11 boom but not his later ignominy, and we're not seeing Reagan after he got the economy sorted.

waterlesscloud 15y ago

Thanks for this. The animation is interesting. Ping pong Truman, for example. Learned some things too, like that LBJ finished up worse off the Nixon did.

epaga 15y ago

Fascinating (and strangely inspiring) that after ~550 days in office, every single president on the chart had the explicit disapproval of at least(!) 16% of the country.

maeon3 15y ago

I'd like to see the same thing with congress's approval ratings broken down by member of congress.