#September 2016 Minnesota Legislature outside spending cartograms

This project visualizes the amount of outside spending by groups supporting Republican and Democratic candidates for Minnesota’s House of Representatives and Senate, as reported to the Minnesota Campaign Finance and Public Disclosure Board.

Since Twin Cities metro-area legislative districts are generally much smaller than Greater Minnesota districts, this project uses cartograms in which all districts are the same size in order to allow for accurate visual comparisons across districts and see any geographic patterns of spending.

The visualizations can be seen in the story Where all that political money is being spent in Minnesota.

##Data The main data for this visualization came from the Campaign Finance Board, based on reports filed by independent expenditure groups covering the period from January 2016 through September 20, 2016. MinnPost edited that spreadsheet by hand to eliminate spending on candidates who lost in the primary and spending on candidates who were not candidates in the district the spending was listed in. We then totaled the spending in each district by groups supporting Democrats (and opposing Republicans) and vice versa. The results of all this are in data/sep-16-mnleg-ies.csv.

Other files in /data are used to determine the names of candidates running in each district and whether they are incumbents, which is provided as supplemental information in the visualization.

##Development This visualization uses flask to process the data and feed it into an HTML template. It was written using Python 3.

To get started, set up a virtual environment:

virtualenv -p python3 venv

and activate it:

source venv/bin/activate

Then install the requirements:

pip install -r requirements.txt

To run it locally:

python carto.py

In general, data processing tasks are found in carto.py and layout/visualization is in templates/index.html.

The arrangement of the districts in the cartograms was made using the very awesome aRanger.