A Data Visualization Newsletter

The 2018 midterm elections are tomorrow and corporate America is very much in the game. Employees and PACs associated with Fortune 500 companies have donated over $180 million to candidates this election cycle, according to an analysis of federal election data by Axios. Slightly over half of that money has gone to GOP candidates, although it vary widely by industry.

Since April 2017, the Economist has been polling 1,500 Americans each week to get a sense of their political preferences. On Saturday, they unveiled a model leveraging that data to predict how American voters from all walks of life might vote on Tuesday. Their analysis found that religion, rather than race, was the strongest indicator of congressional voting intention.

With a slew of competitive House, Senate, and gubernatorial races across the country, candidates on both sides of the aisle are driving their messages home with heavy spending on TV ads. But what are those messages exactly? An analysis by Bloomberg shows that across 210 local television markets, health care, taxes, and jobs seem to be issues that ads are hitting on most.

As Democrats battle to regain control of the House, Republican strategists, commentators, and candidates have rallied around a common slogan the past several weeks: “Jobs Not Mobs”. The phrase was actually birthed in the depths of the far-right internet, spreading across Twitter, Reddit, and Facebook throughout October. The New York Times traces the slogan’s path from internet meme to Republican rallying cry.

In other, non-midterm related news: the planet’s bodies of water are getting hotter. As this article from Reuters shows, those rising temperatures are forcing marine life across the globe to make drastic changes. A long-term study of 70 marine species shows that 90% of them have shifted their populations deeper or northward since 1968, in a search of cooler waters.