Hillary Clinton Guns Venn Diagram

Over the last 2 days, the Venn Diagram tweet by Hillary Clinton has been the rage.  In this case, her intentions were great – about Universal Background Checks of prospective Gun Owners.  But the problem was the graphic she used - it was not a Venn Diagram at all.

What she wanted to convey was:

• population of Americans is ~319 million; of which,
• people who don’t own guns are ~183 million; of which,
• 95% or ~174 million support Background Checks;
• people who own guns are ~136 million; of which,
• 83% or ~113 million support Background Checks;
• so, 90% of Americans support Universal Background Checks.

And this is where Data Collection, Analysis, Understanding, and Visualization come into play.  Since Hillary Clinton’s attempt is at data visualization, we will leave the first 3 for some other time.  But visualizing or presenting any data is a completely different ball game.

Washington Post tried to fix that Venn Diagram, as did the popular Vox.com.  WP gave up trying to put it in a Venn Diagram, and instead opted for a cross between a bar chart and squares.  Vox did something better with circles, and ended up displaying an Euler Diagram.  The problem with Euler diagrams is they are very subtle – especially with datasets like this, and make for poor visualization.

Poor visualization of data is the reason why we lose interest during some presentations, while others keep us entranced.  If you add too much data, you have information overload or data smog, and end up with a pie in your face.

So, what the Hillary campaign should have done?  They should have separated the chaff. What they wanted to shove in everyone’s face with a Venn Diagram was that 90% of Americans, which include 83% of gun owners support Background Checks.

Since they cannot show that in a Venn Diagram, they should have come at it from the other side – visualize outside the box.  Show that only 10% of Americans – gun owners or not – do not support the Universal Background Checks.

What her campaign managers should have put out, is something like this:



If you are interested, you can take a look at:

the WP article at [https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-fix/wp/2016/05/20/we-fixed-hillary-clintons-terrible-venn-diagram-on-gun-control/]

the Vox article at [http://www.vox.com/2016/5/20/11721368/hillary-clinton-guns-venn-diagram]

FYI, I used the free Venn Diagram Plotter by Pacific Northwest National Lab, US DOE at [https://omics.pnl.gov/software/venn-diagram-plotter]

Tags: elections,hillary clinton,uselections

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