5 visuals to cover the election

A choropleth map answers the question no bar chart can: where. Fill each region — state, county, constituency, district — with a color corresponding to the winning party or vote share, and geographic patterns that are invisible in tables become immediately obvious: the urban-rural divide, coastal versus inland, the specific districts that swung the race.

In the UK's 2019 general election, the visual story wasn't just that the Conservatives won — it was the specific geography of the 'Red Wall' constituencies in the North that flipped for the first time in decades. In the 2020 US election, county-level choropleth maps showed a more competitive picture than the state-level result: Biden won cities overwhelmingly; Trump won land overwhelmingly. Both stories are true. The map shows both.

Use a choropleth when geography is part of your story — when where candidates won is as important as by how much.

Every major newsroom — the AP, the BBC, Le Monde — uses some version of a horizontal bar chart on results night because it does one job perfectly: lets readers compare candidates in a single glance. Sort by vote share descending, use party colors, label each bar with the actual percentage. That's most of what you need.

What the horizontal bar does better than a pie chart: it scales. A pie with eight parties becomes unreadable. Eight horizontal bars, sorted by size, are still clear. It also handles partial results well — a bar at 54% with 30% of precincts reporting is legible and honest in a way other formats aren't.

One rule worth keeping: start the x-axis at zero. A chart where both candidates sit between 48% and 52% looks close on a properly scaled chart — because it is. Truncating the axis to make differences look larger is the most reliably criticized mistake in election graphics, and readers notice.

Polls don't just exist at a single point in time — they tell a story over months. An animated bar race chart makes that story visible in a way a static line chart can't quite capture: you watch candidates overtake each other as the campaign unfolds.

The 2020 Democratic primary is the example. For most of the race, Pete Buttigieg led in Iowa while Biden polled in single digits nationally. Then South Carolina happened, the field consolidated almost overnight, and within a week Biden went from afterthought to presumptive nominee. That sequence told through a bar race — bars shifting, candidates rising and falling — is genuinely dramatic content. It's also the format most likely to travel: readers replay it, screenshot it, send it to people who missed the campaign.

It needs data to work well — at least a few months of polling across multiple candidates. If you have that, it's worth the time.

Vote share and seat counts regularly tell different stories — especially in parliamentary systems. After the 2021 German federal election, the SPD won 25.7% of the vote, the Greens 14.8%, the FDP 11.5%, and several smaller parties held the balance of power. A pie chart with six parties becomes hard to read. A bar chart loses the proportional feel. A treemap — each party a rectangle, sized by seats, colored by party — lets you see both the individual party sizes and the coalition math at the same time.

Treemaps are particularly good for showing what a coalition looks like before it's formed: group the parties by potential alliance, and the question 'can they reach a majority?' answers itself visually. For delegate counts in a US primary — where candidates accumulate delegates across dozens of state contests — the same logic applies.

It's a less familiar chart type than a bar or pie, which is an advantage: readers spend a moment with it rather than skimming past.

If you're covering an election over weeks or months, a poll tracker is one of the most-returned-to pieces you can publish. Readers check it after debates, after major news events, after a candidate drops out. Done well, it becomes a reference point for the whole campaign — not a one-time piece but something that gets more valuable the longer it runs.

The standard format: one line per candidate, rolling 7- or 14-day average to smooth out individual polls, dates on the x-axis. What makes a poll tracker good rather than just adequate is annotation — marking debates, major announcements, and events that caused visible movement turns a graph into a narrative. The chart stops being data and starts being the story of the campaign.

FiveThirtyEight's polling averages have been the most-cited tracker in US elections for over a decade. The reason they work is that they're designed to be updated — new polls integrate smoothly rather than causing jarring jumps. Build yours with the same mindset.