Alright, so I’m gonna walk you through how I tackled this “michigan 2024 election map” thing. It was a bit of a journey, but I think the end result is pretty cool.
First off, I needed data. Obvious, right? I started digging around for Michigan election data, specifically focusing on the 2024 election results by county. It took some serious searching, but eventually, I stumbled upon a few government websites that had what I needed. It was messy, like, REALLY messy, but at least it was there.
Next up: cleaning that data. This was probably the most tedious part. Imagine a spreadsheet from hell – inconsistent formatting, random characters, abbreviations you can’t decipher. I spent hours just cleaning and organizing it, making sure all the counties were spelled the same way and the numbers actually made sense. I mostly used Python with Pandas for this part, looping through rows and standardizing everything. It was a real grind.
Then came the mapping part. I knew I wanted a visual map of Michigan, where each county was colored based on election results – maybe red for one party, blue for another, and shades in between to show the margin of victory. I opted for using GeoJSON files for the geographical boundaries of Michigan counties. I found some pre-made GeoJSON files online, but guess what? They didn’t quite match the county names in my cleaned election data. More fiddling required!
So, I had to make sure the county names in my GeoJSON file perfectly matched the county names in my election data. That involved some more data manipulation in Python, tweaking the GeoJSON file until everything lined up perfectly. Pain in the butt, honestly.
With clean data and a matching GeoJSON file, it was time to actually build the map. I chose to use Leaflet, a JavaScript library for interactive maps. It’s pretty straightforward to use once you get the hang of it. I wrote some JavaScript code to load the GeoJSON data, load the election data, and then color each county based on the election results. I played around with different color scales and shading to make sure the map was easy to read and visually appealing.
Finally, I added some interactivity. When you hover over a county, it pops up with the county name and the election results. Just a simple tooltip, but it makes the map much more useful. I also added a legend to explain the color scale.
The biggest hurdle? Getting the data to line up. County names being slightly different between the election data and the GeoJSON file almost drove me crazy. I spent hours just troubleshooting that. Also, making the map look good and easy to understand took a lot of tweaking. Color choices matter!
All in all, it was a fun project. I learned a lot about data cleaning, data visualization, and mapping libraries. Plus, now I have a cool interactive map of the Michigan 2024 election results that I can show off.