US Elections Poll tracker
BBC News
BBC News
Visual Journalism Team
DESIGN
Irene de la Torre Arenas
Irene de la Torre Arenas
DEVELOPMENT
Katie Hassell, Marcos Gurgel, Steven Connor and Shilpa Saraf.
Katie Hassell, Marcos Gurgel, Steven Connor and Shilpa Saraf.
WRITTEN AND PRODUCED BY
Mike Hills and Will Dahlgreen
Mike Hills and Will Dahlgreen
US election 2020 polls: Who is ahead - Trump or Biden? provided information about which candidate of the US General Election seemed to be leading in each of the states.
I designed three modules included in the page: the main line graph showing average voting intention, the individual polls table listing all modelings, and the battleground states table that showed information in those areas where the elections were too close to call. I also helped designed the battleground states map, done in R, and helped program the line graph in d3.js.
Average voting intention
'Who is ahead in the Polls' was the first module designed for the US General Elections 2020. It provided information about who seemed to be leading in the campaign.
We wanted the graphic to be as approachable as possible. Because of that, we included the photographs and names of the candidates. We also used the full name of the political parties instead of using just their acronyms.
The only interactivity added to the graphic was a toggle that allowed the user to show or hide individual polls. It was built using d3.js
Desktop vs. Mobile
Individual polls table
Due to the length of the Individual Polls table, the team decided to include this module in a different page. The piece listed all individual polls about the US Elections that fed the interactive graph.
It used the background color of the cells to highlight the candidate who seemed to be leading. This style was used across all the US Elections 2020 coverage.
To make the user experience on mobile as easy as possible, we included vertical and horizontal scrolls.
Battleground states
A big part of the story around the US Elections happen on the battleground states: Pennsylvania, Georgia, Texas, etc. We included a symbol map to represent the importance of these states in the electoral college and a table that registered who was leading in each of these areas according to the polls.
Thank you!
