Election Shifts & Amazon's New Strategy 🗳️ 🛍️

This Week’s Data Story: The Great Right Shift 🗳️ 🇺🇸 

It’s been a big week for political news, pundits, and reflections on campaign strategies, so I understand if you’re feeling a little burnt out from the coverage. For a lot of people, the most striking aspect was the Republican party’s ability to make significant inroads in traditionally Democratic areas. For example, New York saw a dramatic narrowing of the Democratic margin from 23 to 11 points, in New Jersey it was 16 to 5 points, and Connecticut from 20 to 11 points.

BUT, since we love a data story over here, some of the most interesting visualizations from the election came from the teams over at the Financial Times & the New York Times. They used interesting graphics to show the voting shifts (compared to the 2020 election), including ones that superimposed trend arrows on the U.S. map (above) to ones where the arrow was the visual, like this:

Note, how the NY Times explains the graphic, since it’s a non-traditional one.

And of course, we have to mention the branding of the 2024 Election as the "Podcast Election." And no, not the NPR podcasts, but the podcasts like Call Her Daddy & Joe Rogan that have more influence on the younger everyday voter blocs than traditional media.

Tech Pulse 🖥️ 

• The market is predicting Big Tech’s winners and losers in a Trump presidency.

• Uncle Sam wants you! Especially if you’re a tech exec. The Department of Defense is launching an initiative to recruit techies as part-time military officers in the reserves to lead efforts in data analytics, cybersecurity, and others.

• The Wall Street Journal ran their own investigation and found that X (Twitter)’s algorithm surfaces a ton of political content to new users (about half of all content in their feed) regardless of their stated interests in non-political topics like cooking and crafts. Pro-Trump content appeared almost twice as frequently as pro-Harris material.

• People who found out that a filmmaker used AI were more likely to have a negative opinion about the work. At least according to ArtReview and NOWNESS’s report on the impact of AI on creative fields.

• Is Amazon the new Temu? According to leaked internal discussions, Amazon's pivot to even faster, cheaper delivery of low-priced everyday essentials could position them as a direct competitor to Chinese e-commerce giants like Temu and Shein.

By the Numbers: The Influencer Election 📱💰

Career Corner: Should we find meaning from our jobs? If so, how? 🌟 

@hbrearlycareer

True happiness from work may not come from traditional markers like money, power, or reputation. Arthur Brooks, an HBS Professor and coaut... See more

Beyond the Data 🪩 

• 🎹 “A new Chopin single just dropped!” That’s a sentence I didn’t expect to hear in 2024, but 200+ years after Chopin’s death, his composed work is still being uncovered. *the article features the entire waltz performed by Lang Lang, a pianist. It’s short amd really beautiful… Let me pick up piano lessons again!

• 🇺🇸 1972 + 1984 U.S. election maps, for the curious.

• 🎙️ And for anyone who clicked “buy now” on a Shure microphone when they heard that the liberals need their own Joe Rogan… It might not be that simple.

• 🌊 We’re reaching the end of hurricane season, but something I noticed this year, was the use of visualizations & simulations (like this one from the Weather Channel) to show viewers what the destruction could look like.

• 📸 If there’s one thing I love, it’s a massive photo book. And this new one, Magnum America, is a visual history of the U.S. from the past 80 years, and answers the question: “What is ‘America’? What does it look like? Where can it be found? What does “America” mean, and for whom?”

On to another week!

— Kere