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I wanted to get back to my roots in Political Science briefly and explore how money influences elections. Campaign finance is a complex issue and more money doesn’t necessarily lead to winning an election, but Super PAC spending has ballooned in the past decade and I thought it was worth exploring further. I created the following two visualizations and they tell a striking story. The scatter plot highlights how the most contested races get the most Super PAC money–this should not be terribly surprising. But I wanted to explore this further so I created the waffle plot and it shows that Republicans in contested races seem to spend a significant portion of their money opposing their opposition rather than supporting their candidate; whereas, Democratic Super PACs vary in oppositional or supportive spending.

Since cross-domain resizing is non-trivial, I wrote the following shortcode that takes the name of your app as its first argument and the number of vertical pixels as its second argument.

Data Source(s): FEC Data 2024

I’ve noticed that primary care has changed over the years. From 2000-2026 there’s been a large increase in Urgent Care Clinics. This makes primary care accessible and affordable, but also means that there’s a decline in primary care doctors who own their own practices. I wanted to explore where these Urgent Care Clinics were located to see if there’s any trends on which areas and neighborhoods are being choosen and if at risk communities in Duval County, where I used to live, could easily access these places or not. Using ARC GIS I created a layer that found census tracts that are at risk and then also mapped the location of Urgent Care Clinics. Overall, there was pretty good coverage in Duval County, but I think it would be compelling to expand this research to look at rural communities and their accessibility to primary care. This is an ongoing topic of interest understanding how private equity is reshaping healthcare in the US and the pros and cons of these changes.