How 38 counties that represent a truly diverse America voted

Given Fusion's audience, we decided to focus our election night reporting on how places that represented the true diversity of America voted. Although the counties were selected and data visualizations were prepped in advance, the bulk of the work on this piece happened on the night as we processed the AP's real-time results to give our readers a view of how majority-minority counties voted compared with other places. 

How much does your vote count?

Most people understand that the electoral college has a distorting effect on the power of an individual's vote.  But fewer understand just how much and why. So, we built a tool that showed people the real power of their vote. It showed how the shifting landscape of the race along with voter turnout rates gave individual voters more or less influence in the outcome of the election. The tool was built by Fusion team member and data guru Daniel Mclaughlin. Kate Stohr's role was to help explain the complex algorithm behind the tool in a way that readers could easily understand. 

Before you vote for a third-party candidate, here’s what you need to know

As the campaign headed into the fall homestretch, we spotted a rise in interest in third-party candidate's social media. Polling numbers for Libertarian Gary Johnson and Green Party candidate Jill Stein had risen sharply. Using historic Gallup data we looked to see how their polling numbers compared to those of past third-party candidates at the same period in the campaign cycle.  Since 1988, third party candidates have averaged less than one tenth of a percent of the popular vote. As it turned out both Stein and Johnson were polling above average, but as with past third-party campaigns, interest wained as election day neared. Although both got more votes than they had in 2012, neither gained the 5% needed to to qualify their parties for federal funding in the next election. 

Here are all the Congresspeople who took NRA money and tweeted prayers for Orlando

In the wake of the Orlando night club shooting, politicians around the country tweeted their condolences to friends and families of the victims. Gun control activists pointed out that many of these same tweets came from members of Congress who accepted funds from the National Rifle Association. Using data from opensecrets.org and Carto's mapping API, we sought to bring this painful contradiction to light. 

Warning: This election contains language some people may find offensive

Uncivil discourse in politics is nothing new, but we can now track it in real time. For this piece we partnered with MIT to access data from a new tool they developed called the Electome, which parsed Twitter's full firehose to identify election-related tweets. This combined with NLP tools they applied to the dataset allowed filtering and analysis of the political conversation on Twitter— and it wasn't necessarily polite. Kate Stohr's reporting looked at the types and topics  of uncivil discourse as well as some of the reasons behind it. 

Donald Trump loves ‘poorly educated’ voters. Just who is he talking about?

This early piece helped elucidate why Donald Trump was excited about  'poorly educated' voters (Hint: They represent anywhere from 1 in 10 to 6 in 10 Americans depending on how you define 'poorly educated.')

Responding to the news cycle, we turned the piece around in a few hours. It was one of the few data explainers we did using available research. Most of our work focused on original datasets created by us or by partners.

When presidential candidates tag each other on Twitter, things get awkward

In this piece, we analyzed candidate tweets that have used the @[username] convention to mention other candidates since the campaign began. We wanted to see how often the candidates tagged each other on Twitter, whom they tag, and why.

At the start of the project Fusion's data team faced a number of challenges, including a lack of access to the site's production servers and to visualization tools. Stohr identified a number of work arounds, from creating infographic representations such as this one to using third-party service providers like Carto and Plot.ly.