By: Matt Irwin
The New York Times just published detailed maps of all 2,278,000 individual donations to Democratic primary candidates, painting a data-driven story of the $152 million raised to date. The maps narrate the primary race in a way that’s hard to reproduce with debate sound bites and polling statistics. Who’s raising how much money from how many people across all 42,000 US ZIP codes?
The maps use a custom Albers projection (here’s our favorite technique for alternate projections in Mapbox) with inset maps of Alaska, Hawaii, and Puerto Rico.
The maps are fully interactive, so you can explore city-level detail, where broad national trends get more complex. Denser populations mean that, for example, Elizabeth Warren can have more donors in a single Manhattan ZIP code than any donor has in the entire state of Mississippi.
We love these maps. And we’re committed to helping journalists and others add truth and context to the election process. If you’re working on mapping election data publicly, Mapbox will offer free use of our platform for media and advocacy organizations. Check out our team’s guide to election mapping to get started. And if you need a hand, drop me a line at matt@mapbox.com.
Every dollar in the 2020 Democratic primary was originally published in Points of interest on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.