How TargetEarly Visualized the Most Important Early Vote Election of Our Time
Tags: Targetsmart, 2020election, Dataviz, Targetearly

How TargetEarly Visualized the Most Important Early Vote Election of Our Time TargetSmart Follow Apr 5 · 4 min read

By: Joe Garland and Rina Schiller

The 2020 election cycle posed unprecedented challenges for voters, campaign staffers, government officials, journalists, and political scientists. In response to a pandemic that upended all aspects of public life and threatened to torpedo voter participation, a wave of new laws and regulations added to the uncertainty of the voting environment. Expanded early voting and vote-by-mail programs in all fifty states and DC fueled a massive surge in votes cast before November 3 — over 100 million voters returned a ballot prior to Election Day in 2020, more than doubling the number of early votes cast just four years prior. And as it became clear that voter turnout would exceed all expectations, two key questions emerged: how much would this surge of early voters alter the overall electorate, and what segments of the electorate would make the greatest overall impact?

This rapidly changing landscape left us at TargetSmart with a unique opportunity to provide timely and detailed early voting data to the progressive ecosphere, the media, and the general public. Armed with the nation’s most comprehensive and accurate voter file, a best-in-the-industry data products team collecting and cleaning early vote data around the clock, and investment in platforms equipped to rapidly process large national databases, the TargetSmart team built TargetEarly. The groundbreaking site allowed election observers around the world the opportunity to study daily pattern shifts in voting behavior, as they were happening, at the click of a mouse.

TargetEarly Demographics Visualization

How did we build TargetEarly?

We separated the development process into:

1. data aggregation

2. data visualization and web development.

Comparing individual-level demographic and partisan data for over 150 million voters across three election cycles posed significant challenges, not the least of which was a need for agility in our processes after an unprecedented wave of early voting ballooned the size of our build files. We were able to address this problem and rebuild our aggregation flows quickly and on the fly with minimal disruption because of agile and beautiful workflows that looked like this:

The TargetEarly workflow…simple!

To help us be nimble, TargetSmart leaned on the variety of tools offered by Amazon Web Services (AWS). To get technical, TargetEarly ultimately leveraged a series of CSV files stored in AWS S3 buckets, which were picked up by our front-end to calculate summaries and draw visualizations using code written in HTML, CSS, and JavaScript. We used D3.js, a JavaScript data visualization library, to build the graphs. The site is served through AWS CloudFront, a low-latency Content Delivery Network (CDN). To sum it up, these technologies enabled TargetEarly to withstand an unexpectedly large wave of public interest, scaling to hundreds of thousands of users securely and without significant latency or availability concerns.

The team that made TargetEarly possible consisted of folks from TargetSmart’s Client Tech and Strategic Consulting & Analytics teams. This cross-team collaboration was instrumental to getting TargetEarly out and ensuring the success of the project. We are proud to have created a product that was so important to the movement and genuinely enjoyed building it together.

We have to say, after all the work that went in to TargetEarly, the hardest part of the entire process was choosing the colors. Here’s just a few of the iterations:

A few of the iterations, regarding the color scheme of TargetEarly.

How did TargetEarly impact the election?

TargetEarly’s greatest success became evident as media coverage of the 2020 election reached a fever pitch. In the days leading up to November 3, TargetEarly allowed journalists across the globe to analyze early voting patterns at levels of specificity and granularity never before seen in a presidential election. While a wide array of national and international news outlets used the site to generate overall top-lines, a full host of local outlets were also using the site to paint a more nuanced picture of what early voting patterns meant for their coverage areas.

The very existence of TargetEarly democratized the political data landscape — suddenly small newspapers and local broadcast news programs had up to date access to the same aggregate data that in prior cycles had only been available to network news and high-profile national dailies. And by expanding access to accurate data, we are helping to publicly and transparently combat misinformation.

Currently in Georgia, where Republican-led efforts threaten to seriously restrict voting rights for millions of voters, activists are leaning on data from TargetEarly to illustrate the clear racial bias at the heart of these anti-democratic measures.

TargetEarly was a vital resource in the Democratic ecosystem in this last election cycle, and we plan to make the platform even bigger and better in elections to come.

Check it out for yourself at TargetEarly.