A key measure of influence in politics is one’s network. Our new interactive visual explores the relationships between candidates in tomorrow’s U.S. midterm elections.
Using data from election.twitter.com – our new Twitter #Election2014 dashboard (more about that here) – this network graph built by Twitter data visualization scientist Nicolas Belmonte includes more than 1,600 Twitter accounts associated with Congressional representatives, senators, governors and the 2014 candidates for a number of these offices.
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The big circles are the politicians who follow (and are followed back by) the most others. Blue circles represent Democrats; red circles represent Republicans.
You can explore the interactive by:
After exploring this visualization, we’ve derived a few insights:
The visual is almost evenly split between 581 Republicans and 546 Democrats (along with a smattering of independents, which are colored gray). Of the 581 Republicans, 85% have no mutual connections on Twitter with a single Democratic politician or candidate. Similarly, 86% of the Democrats have no mutual Republican connections on Twitter.
Rep. John Shimkus (IL-15; @RepShimkus) has more mutual followers than anybody else up for election next week: 165.
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He not only follows Republicans, but also an impressive number of Democrats, accounting for 13% of his mutual follows. One of his connections is Democratic Rep. Diana DeGette from Colorado (CO-1; @RepDianaDeGette), who also follows (and is followed back by) a number of Republicans:
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See those blue dots among the red (and vice versa)? Those outliers follow politicians from outside their party. For example, Mark Takai, (H1-1; @MarkTakai) follows other Hawaiian politicians from both parties:
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Look what happens when we switch to the office view to see how senators connect to representatives and governors, regardless of party:
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These are just some of the insights we’ve learned from this visualization: what can you find?
The interactive can be Tweeted or embedded by clicking either the ‘Tweet this view’ or ‘Embed this view’ buttons at the top of the screen.