The 29 Unopposed House seats in 2016 Election
I'm fairly new to the world of election data, but while working on the 2016 elections for NBC News, I stumbled on one interesting fact: 29 House seats went unopposed. I wanted to understand why that happens. Half a dozen ill-informed Google searches later, I had nothing.
The logical next step (for me) was to make a static map. I used TopoJSON from Atlas-Make and the final House results from the AP Elections API, and rendered them together with D3Node.
The Data
- CSV of the 29 races with only one candidate
- TopoJSON of the 115th Congressional Districts with US states
The Map
The Code
github.com/bradoyler/d3-node/examples/map-congress-unopposed.js
Lesson learned
It turns out every single unopposed race had an incumbent running, which was the most telling piece of data and more or less answered my original question. Still, I thought this map might be useful to someone, or even inspire someone to run for office!