How The Wall Street Journal Visualized the Issues that Split the Republican Vote

To help explain this stormy primary season in American politics, The Wall Street Journal recently published an interactive project to answer the question: What do the voters in the two parties look like?

Using data from a Wall Street Journal/NBC News poll, the paper visualized how voters coalesced around issues like immigration, gun rights, and political ideology and showed who those groups were most likely to vote for. To do this, WSJ’s visualization “How Sanders Happened” uses bar graphs and nimble annotations. But the paper’s visualization of the social conservatives and establishment voters split between Ted Cruz, Marco Rubio and Donald Trump is more impressive. The reporters and developers deftly use human figures to illustrate the polling data that is too often presented in too dry a manner.

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