Paths 2 Victory

Inspired by this lovely Mike Bostock project and this lovely NPR Viz project, this is a simple "paths to victory" generator for an arbitrary set of candidates in an electoral contest.

Getting started

1. Start a Google sheet with your race ratings. Here's what we expect as headers:

state	first_results	ev	swing	swing2	90pct12hr rating

• state: string, a state abbreviation
• first_results: string, a parseable timestamp for a time when first results could be announced
• ev: int, a number of electoral votes
• swing: boolean, is this in a group of swing states?
• swing2: boolean, is this in an expanded group of swing states?
• 90pct12hr: boolean, do we expect a large percentage of the total vote within 12 hours of poll closing?
• rating: int, range 3 to -3 where 3 is locked Democratic and -3 is locked Republican and 0 is a swing state

2. Export some environment variables. You need SHEET_ID to correspond to the ID of your Google sheet and SHEET_RANGE to correspond to the range of cells you'd like to capture for use.

3. Save your Google auth credentials as a JSON file. This is a pretty good explainer. Save the resulting file as credentials.json (it's gitignored) and make sure it's in the root of this project.

Usage

mkvirtualenv p2v
git clone git@github.com:jeremyjbowers/paths2victory.git
cd paths2victory
pip install -r requirements.txt
p2v.py

This produces a JSON file for each of the candidates listed in settings.CANDIDATES using their slug as the namespace for the file.

Sample output

[
 {
  "evs": 271,
  "states": [
   {
    "state": "FL",
    "ev": 29
   },
   {
    "state": "PA",
    "ev": 20
   }
  ],
  "state_string": "FL (29), PA (20)",
  "num_states": 2
 },
 {
  "evs": 283,
  "states": [
   {
    "state": "FL",
    "ev": 29
   },
   {
    "state": "GA",
    "ev": 16
   },
   {
    "state": "MI",
    "ev": 16
   }
  ],
  "state_string": "FL (29), GA (16), MI (16)",
  "num_states": 3
 }
]