Category: politics

Explaining the electoral college in the New York Times

How exactly does the electoral college work? My explainer is in the October 25, 2020 edition of the New York Times‘ Kids section. (The section isn’t available online, but here’s the Instagram version of the piece.)

Tech companies donate to Democrats and Republicans; their employees lean left

For Protocol, a news site launched by the publisher of Politico, I analyzed thousands of contributions from employees of top technology companies, as well as the donations those companies’ PACs gave to candidates. My findings: Tech companies divide their political spending very neatly between Democrats and Republicans. Their workers — whose dollars largely fund their employers’ PACs — support Democratic candidates by a wide margin.

dawwW-tech-company-pacs-are-largely-bipartisan-their-employees-favor-democrats-

Guns in America, in 5 charts

Following mass shootings in Pittsburgh and Thousand Oaks, California, I once again dove into the data on Americans’ very unique relationship with guns. Among the stats: the US is the only rich nation to see so many citizens die from bullet wounds; two-thirds of gun deaths in the US come from suicides, US manufacturing of firearms has skyrocketed since Barack Obama was elected.

In the chart below, I plotted data about deaths per capita by country against GDP per capita for more than 100 nations. As you can see, the US stands alone.

Silicon Valley workers really do prefer Democrats

Two years ago I analyzed data from the US Federal Election Commission to determine the political leanings of workers at tech companies. This year, I did it again for the midterms, analyzing more than 100,000 political campaign contributions made by workers at five top technology companies.

This piece also shows some of the work I’ve been doing at WIRED, getting our new data-visualization tool, Datawrapper, working with Condé Nast’s custom-built CMS.