We were looking forward to the causus and how it might turn out, based on campaign data and trends. We were interested in running some scenarios by precinct and looking at the results by county. A table is the usual way to do this, but it is 100 times easier to visualise and understand the data if it is laid out on a map.
Usually I would have used a GIS program, but I was using a laptop where I can't install programs and i had 24 hours in Iowa to visualise some data and leave a tool there for the campaign to use on election night.
Here's what I built ... in Excel.
The excel tool allows you to slot in data of your own and see the map of it. I actually built it to allow EASY customisation by state, so that it could be used for the rest of the primaries. But it both wasn't as easy to use as I thought it was and people on the campaign actually had better things to do than to play with Excel, so it was only used in Iowa. Oh well!
The map layout was inspired by http://www.style.org/iowacaucus/
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