Policy & Politics

Campaigns, elections and U.S. national policy.

Visualizing Historical Political Party Identification in the Era of Trump

By Matt Stiles | Matt Stiles | Topics: Policy & Politics

As many have noted, President Trump has shown a remarkable ability to maintain a strong base of support — about 40% of the voters — despite the myriad controversies swirling around him.

Some clues about that base can be seen in the results of a fascinating survey taken recently by Pew Research Center to gauge Americans’ reaction to the Mueller investigation.

Deep in the white paper released by Pew are historical numbers listing the percentages of Americans who either support one of the two major parties or consider themselves independents, many of whom admit leaning left or right . These data probably aren’t news to people who follow politics more closely than I do, but the broad trends they illustrate were interesting to me — especially when analyzed visually.

First, the data show how support for these groups has changed over time. The reds in the normalized stacked bar chart below represent people who identify with Republicans, or lean towards them, and people who identify with Democrats, or lean toward them. The middle represents a smaller group that supports some other party or doesn’t have strong opinions. I’m calling them “rest”. These are the folks, I suppose, who help decide elections — if they vote.

Neither of the two major parties have maintained a majority of support, but the Democrats were there briefly during the election of Barack Omama and have come closer than the Republicans during the Trump era. You can see bursts of support for the GOP after former President Bill Clinton’s election, when the Republicans took back the U.S. House of Representatives, and in the years following the September 11 terror attacks.

This line chart plots the same groups from a different perspective, perhaps making it easier to see the changes to core party support and the broader strength with some independents leaning their way. You can see the positive swings for Democrats during the early days of the Clinton and Obama eras, and also how GOP support fell during the George W. Bush presidency.

Identification with the presidential party during Clinton, Bush and Obama either dropped or remained flat after they took office. Under Trump, however, the people who identify as Republican (and their learners) have rallied to their embattled president.

This small illustration helps explain the president’s resilient approval numbers. I’ll leave it to others to explain why those supporters remain.

You can download the data from Pew Research Center here.

Visualizing Verified Twitter’s Reaction to Robert Mueller’s Investigation

By Matt Stiles | Matt Stiles | Topics: Policy & Politics

Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s now-concluded investigation into the Trump campaign and Russian influence over the 2016 presidential election was obviously a hot topic on Twitter.

More than 400,000 tweets — an average about 600 per day — mentioned the word* “Mueller” since the former FBI chief was appointed to lead the investigation in May 2017, according to a dump (190MB csv) of verified user data pulled from the social network using Python and Twint.

That interest spiked during key news events before skyrocketing on Friday and Sunday, when Mueller concluded the investigation and then the Department of Justice released a letter summarizing the findings:

You can download the data here (190MB csv).

* This data dump, due to my general laziness and day job duties, includes a bit of noise from misspellings of the the German footballer Thomas Müller’s name and some other unrelated “Mueller” tweets — about 60 a day, I would say, on average. You get the idea, though.

[Photo courtesy The (Obama) White House, via Wikimedia Commons]

Trump’s Approval Ratings are Resilient. How Does that Compare Historically?

By Matt Stiles | Matt Stiles | Topics: Policy & Politics

Despite all the controversy attached to his presidency, Donald Trump has managed to retain a relatively consistent approval rating in the last two years — especially when compared to predecessors in the modern era.

The president’s approval rating has climbed some in recent weeks after a significant decline in January, reverting to around the average during the last two years.

Perhaps it’s the tribalism in American politics or the fragmented news ecosystem or the president’s skills as a communicator — but, for some reason, Trump hasn’t experienced the wide fluctuations of his predecessors.

He also, of course, remains historically unpopular.

According to Gallup, the president’s rating changes have stayed within a 14 percentage point range.

Other presidents — even those who only served one term — have experienced wider swings in their popularity over time. The late George H.W. Bush, for example, saw his popularity drop from 89% in February 1991 to 29% the following summer, a massive change.

Here are all the presidents, and their popularity ranges, since Harry Truman:

Image courtesy WikiMedia Commons

Visualizing a Year of @realDonaldTrump

By Matt Stiles | Matt Stiles | Topics: Policy & Politics, Social Media

President Trump thumbed his way through another year in the White House on Twitter, compiling a good (great) collection of 2,930 touts, complaints, defenses and rants.

He left 2018 with this perplexing New Year’s Eve missive extolling the old-fashioned endurance of “Walls” and “Wheels” as one of his last.

As the message shows, the president’s twitter presence lately is crowded by an increasingly evergreen list of grievances (Democrats, Russia, fake news, etc). Still, plenty of his messages actually correspond quite neatly with news events.

Notice how the #maga hashtag, a political rallying cry, disappears after the midterm elections. He talks about The Wall and shutdowns in and around the shutdowns, of course. And he decries Special Counsel Robert Mueller most often around the times his former aides have appeared (and been convicted or pleaded guilty) in federal court.

These examples are obvious when plotted on a timeline with annotation:

Through it all, the president’s audience of followers grew steadily by 10 million users. He now has 56.7 million followers (me included). He’s No. 15 on that measure, according to friendorfollow.com, sandwiched between heavy hitters like @selenagomez and @britneyspears!

During 2018, @realDonaldTrump spread his tweets throughout the days of the week, with the president even finding time on the weekends to sound off:

This large collection of messages, scraped using twint, drew more than 300 million of engagements, with “likes” being most common by far. This one about North Korean leader Kim Jong Un a year ago received a whopping 475,000 likes, topping the list.

Here’s how those engagements split proportionally:

Speaking of retweets, there were 57 million in 2018. They came at the rate of 200,000 per day in some months. This popular “they-just-don’t-get-it” mashup of video clips, for example, received more than 110,000 retweets alone in July:

And, finally, as in years past, those messages were a mix of endorsements, promotions, defenses and complaints. Among the more popular keywords (sorry, no word clouds here):

You can download the data as a CSV here. Happy New Year!

Charting the Korean War’s Missing Troops

By Matt Stiles | Matt Stiles | Topics: North Korea, Policy & Politics, South Korea

I wrote recently about the effort to get North Korea to return some of the remains of United States troops who are still unaccounted for since the Korean War.

More than 7,000 troops — almost all presumed dead — never came home after the conflict, which ended with an armistice in 1953. There’s new hope that recent diplomacy between the United States and North Korea might allow some of those remains to come home.

The Defense POW/MIA Accounting Agency, whose mission is to find these troops from several past conflicts and identify them, posts data on those from the Korean War.

My friend Bob Rudis graciously helped me free the data from its original PDF format (though the agency later released a spreadsheet in response to my requests). BTW: Bob did an excellent job documenting his process for cleaning the data and creating a chart.

I had to give some visualizations a try, too.

More than 30,000 United States troops died in the war, a brutal conflict dramatically changed by the involvement of Chinese forces after an initially strong advance into the North by the Americans early in the fighting.

Many of those who never came home were pilots, like one I profiled recently, or ground troops engaged in tough fighting at places like the Chosin Reservoir.

Here’s the timeline for when these “unaccounted for” troops were lost over the course of the war (the winter 1950 spikes represent the Chinese counterattack and the Chosin Reservoir battle):

Here are the days of the week in which those losses occurred. This could be random chance, but some 300 troops were reported lost on Dec. 2, 1950, as especially fierce fighting with the Chinese erupted during a battle around Yudam-ni. It was a Thursday:

Most of those lost were, of course, from the U.S. Army, which endured heavy casualties. The soldiers’ fates were made more perilous by the freezing weather conditions:

The most populous states, as you’d expect, lost the most troops. Those still missing came from all over the United States, though, and this map shows the rate of loss per 10,000 population (as of 1950). States such Alaska, Nevada and some in the Northeast and Mid Atlantic experienced a disproportionate loss.

You can get the data here and, again, check out Bob Rudis’ own documentation showing how the data were converted from PDF and visualized using R.

Charting the GOP’s Congressional Exodus

By Matt Stiles | Matt Stiles | Topics: Policy & Politics

Another Republican in the U.S. House — Speaker Paul Ryan, no less — announced his intention not to seek re-election in 2018, adding to the number of members leaving ahead of what’s expected to be an unfavorable mid-term environment for the party.

Even before Ryan’s announcement, HuffPost reported that the number of GOP congressmen leaving the chamber, either for retirement or other offices, has hit numbers not seen in decades. His exit is likely to increase that number soon.

This chart shows how the GOP members’ announcements over this cycle have cumulative outpaced their Democratic counterparts:

And here’s a breakdown of retirements, by party, over the years:

China’s Imbalanced Trade with the United States, in Four Charts

By Matt Stiles | Matt Stiles | Topics: Economy & Finance, Policy & Politics

A trade war could be looming between the United States and China, fueled by President Trump’s fixation on the two nations’ unbalanced import-export relationship.

The trade imbalance between the two countries — which might not hurt the United States that much — stems from the fact that China sells more to us than it buys, essentially.

That’s largely driven by macroeconomic factors, not some malicious intent: China is a low-cost manufacturing powerhouse, and the United States is an economy dominated by domestic consumption.

These charts help explain the $570 billion overall trade relationship between world’s largest economies.

First, here’s how the trade has changed over time. The United States imported $460 billion in goods from China last year. That figure has steadily increased in recent decades as China emerged as Asia’s top manufacturer. Exports from the United States to China, which doesn’t yet have the same per-capita domestic consumption as America, haven’t kept pace (again, not that we should be worried).

Here’s the same data, told with a column chart. It shows trade between the two countries in proportion. About 20% of our trade with China last year, and over recent years, has been from exports. Imports represent about 80% of our goods exchanges, on the other hand.

The resulting balance of trade, or trade deficit in this case, has also grown steadily over the years. These charts show the change, year by year, since 1998. Red bars represent the growing trade deficit in billions of dollars by month.

This measure — the trade balance — varies widely by country. One way to examine the relationship with other countries is to look at the balance in the context of the respective total trade. How much does the balance represent as a percentage of overall transactions, for example?

These charts show that figure for America’s top-40 trading partners in 2008. Blue bars reflect a positive trade balance for the United States. Red bars mean it suffered a trade deficit with a particular country in a given year.

When examined this way, you can see that China isn’t the only country in the world to sell more to Americans than it buys. China’s deficit might be huge — its population and output is quite large — but the trade deficit looks similar to other countries figures when viewed proportionally.

Promo background image courtesy Keith Roper.

Chart: Republican Attacks on the FBI Have Worked, Especially on Republicans

By Matt Stiles | Matt Stiles | Topics: Policy & Politics

HuffPost is out with an interesting poll about the the public’s trust in the FBI, which has been under attack recently for its role in the investigations of Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump.

Trump and his supporters have been particularly tough on the bureau, and it shows in the polling data.

A slim 51 percent majority of the public say they have at least a fair amount of trust in the FBI, according to a new HuffPost/YouGov poll, down 12 points since 2015. Most of that change comes from Republicans and independents, among whom the percentage saying they trust the agency dropped by 22 points and 15 points, respectively. Allies of the White House have spent much of January ramping up their attacks against the FBI’s Russia investigation.

This chart shows the change:

Chart inspiration via Katie Park. Image courtesy “Brunswyk” via Wikimedia Commons.

How Do We Solve North Korea? Yonsei University Students Have Ideas.

By Matt Stiles | Matt Stiles | Topics: North Korea, Policy & Politics

I gave a guest lecture today to an East Asian international relations course at Yonsei University in Seoul. As part of the class, the more than 40 students participated in an exercise by answering this question about North Korea:

How do we address the North Korea nuclear issue?
1. Accept as nuclear state
2. Strike known nuclear targets
3. International sanctions
4. Suspend U.S. military drills
5. Diplomacy
6. Two of above: __ & __

Here are the results:

Assessing Global Health in Four Key Diseases

By Matt Stiles | Matt Stiles | Topics: Demographics, Policy & Politics

While reporting on South Korea’s high suicide mortality rate recently, I discovered an unique data set maintained by the World Health Organization.

It contains the probability that residents in each country will die from four noncommunicable diseases between the ages of 30 and 70. These are diseases such as cancer, chronic respiratory illness, heart disease and diabetes. They can offer clues about a country’s overall health.

This type of illness are often caused by “modifiable risk factors”, according to the organization, such as tobacco use, alcohol abuse, unhealthy diet, obesity, high blood pressure, etc.

“This invisible epidemic is an under-appreciated cause of poverty and hinders the economic development of many countries,” according to a statement on the organization’s website. “The burden is growing — the number of people, families and communities afflicted is increasing.”

The probability ranges wildly by country and region. Papua New Guinea tops the list with a 36% probability that its residents will die before age 70 from one of these four diseases.

South Korea, which has the industrialized world’s highest suicide mortality rate, largely propelled by its elderly population, shares with Iceland the lowest probably rate: 8.3%.

The rate in the United States is 13.3%, below the global average from this study, which is 18.8%, but still wedged between Panama and Slovenia.

Here’s how the different regions (as classified by the organization) differ:

And here are the countries, separated by region and sorted by highest probability:

Image of the World Health Organization headquarters in Geneva via Wikimedia Commons.