

Visualization of U.S presidents' approval ratings - wisp
http://www.clusterize.com/comparisons/5-us-presidents-job-approval-ratings

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rcthompson
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.

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xianshou
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.

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mbostock
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...](http://eagereyes.org/blog/2012/embracing-uncertainty-two-line-charts)

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thomasgerbe
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...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Historical_rankings_of_Presidents_of_the_United_States)

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

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

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Terretta
Read this:

[http://www.thedailybeast.com/newsweek/2012/01/15/andrew-
sull...](http://www.thedailybeast.com/newsweek/2012/01/15/andrew-sullivan-how-
obama-s-long-game-will-outsmart-his-critics.html)

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

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wvenable
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.

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rorrr
> _It's a budget bill_

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

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joejohnson
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.

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

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joejohnson
Right, thus the dependence between the two quantities.

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greyhill
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?

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ordinary
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.

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uiri
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.

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pippy
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.

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epaga
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.

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waterlesscloud
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.

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

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rcthompson
Works prefectly fine for me on FF 9.0.1 on Ubuntu.

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maeon3
I'd like to see the same thing with congress's approval ratings broken down by
member of congress.

