Tableau Public: Who Lies The Most? The 2016 Presidential Election

who-lies-the-most

UPDATE – October 23, 2016

Readers:

I have updated my data from the latest data on Politifact.com for my interactive version of this chart that is published on Tableau Public.

Thanks,

Michael

Readers:

Back on July 24, 2016, I blogged on my data visualization web site a stacked bar chart titled Who Lies More?, created by Robert Mann, answering the question which politicians lie more. His chart was based on data from PolitiFact.

I have received a lot of site traffic based on posting Robert’s chart. I was interested in developing a data visualization for Tableau Public, so I went out and extracted fresh data from PolitiFact.com for the Executive Branch (e.g., President Obama, VP Joe Biden), our congressional leaders on both sides of the aisle, and the five major political parties who have selected a candidate to run for president (and vice president).

For my Tableau workbook, all fact counts were taken from the Politifact Web Site starting September 9, 2016. The date each candidate’s facts were extracted can be seen when you hover over a bubble on the Who Lies The Most Dashboard and view the tooltip information.

Click on the image below to go to the interactive version in Tableau Public.

who-lies-the-most-dashboard

All headshot photos of the candidates were taken from the Politifact Web site or Wikipedia. I tried to ensure each candidate has a smile on their face versus a frown or angry look. I did this to try and remove any bias associated with the photo.

The size of the bubbles is related to the total number of facts available for that candidate on the Politifact Web Site. If a candidate currently has less than 18 facts, I did not include them in the bubble matrix mix, but did show them in the upper left  corner of the dashboard with the total number of facts each of them had. As new facts are added to their count in Politifact, I will update them accordingly and integrate them into the matrix mix when they each reach 18 or more facts.

The color of the bubbles was determined as follows:

Dark Red      > 67% False

Red                > 57% False

Orange          > 52% False

Yellow            Approximately 50-50

Light Blue     > 52% True

Blue               > 57% True

Dark Blue     > 67% True

This is a “first cut” of this Tableau Workbook. It needs some more work and I have additional changes I want to make over the next few weeks, and will need this amount of time as I have some hot projects going on at work.

If you find any errors or omissions in any of the charts provided, it was unintentionally and in no way was meant to make a certain candidate look better or worse. Please e-mail me at michael@dataarchaeology.net with your suggested corrections and I will make those that are fair and reasonable.

I would also like to hear your suggestions for making this workbook as fair and accurate as possible. And, no, I cannot influence PolitiFact on their methodology or how they report their data.

Thanks for stopping by.

Best regards,

Michael

 

4 thoughts on “Tableau Public: Who Lies The Most? The 2016 Presidential Election

  1. Politifact has done a great service to all. One concern is your axis “Mostly Lies” vs. “Mostly Truths,” epistemically, the opposite of a Truth is a Falsehood, whereas a Lie implies intent. In some cases, a Falsehood can be a discernable lie, where it’s obvious the speaker knows what he/she is saying False.

    For example, Ted Cruz is known to be highly intelligent and well-informed, and when he speaks a falsehood, I might be justified in assuming it’s a lie.

    In contrast, Ben Carson is a complete ignoramus. He knows how to cut brains, but outside of his speciality he’s some kind of an idiot. In his case, I’d tend to think he’s speaking Falsehoods that he doesn’t know are false.

    In that same vein, Donald Trump is deranged. Is a Falsehood spoken by a madman still a lie, or a delusion?

  2. For some reason, I can’t get the Tableau visualizaton to work in my Firefox browser. I opened it in Chrome, no problem.

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