Visualization of U.S presidents' approval ratings | Hacker News Reader

Visualization of U.S presidents' approval ratings

clusterize.com

59 pointswisp35 comments

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.

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.

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-lin...

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.

But let's face it, the reason we're having our attention drawn to this right now is that we've got a president running for reelection, so it gives us exactly what we want to know.

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_y...

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_Presiden...

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

Or maybe that certain presidents make certain promises and then consistently break them. Obama has been very disappointing, I had high hopes for him.

You had high hopes, but with the last president not even hopes. It's totally different, what's worse? Cool graph though.

Read this:

http://www.thedailybeast.com/newsweek/2012/01/15/andrew-sull...

What's Obama's long game on signing NDAA 2012? There's no excuse for that.

The National Defense Authroization Act basically keeps in existence and funds the US military every year. Not signing it would've been a poorly chosen battle.

At the end of the day, not only do we have a divided system of power by design, Congress is the first among coequal powers in that design. Laying all the blame at the feet of the president for Congress enacting bad law makes no senss. I think some people love our system in theory but don't like it in practice.

There is no excuse for signing a law which effectively puts the US under martial law.

Period.

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.

I'm not sure why I got downvoted; there's nothing inaccurate about what I said. Don't blame the messenger.

Then why did he pressure congress into making the rules even hazier so he could detain Americans as well?

I do blame everyone who had fingerprints on it. Obama was not obliged to sign it. He did.

> It's a budget bill

That got to be the stupidest excuse to introduce new horrible laws.

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.

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?

Approval + disapproval is almost always less than 100 in most polls.

Right, thus the dependence between the two quantities.

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?

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.

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?

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.

Maybe approval visit year of election(or when the poll was taken) I think that would show a downward tendency.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

Works prefectly fine for me on FF 9.0.1 on Ubuntu.

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

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