Earlier this week I put together a series of graphics tracing Donald Trump’s approval rating by voter group and party affiliation, even throwing in the generic congressional ballot for good measure. While cool to have a point-in-time snapshot, I figured this could be a lot more useful if built into a live dashboard, with data updating automatically (as opposed to whenever I chose to save the charts).

To make that happen, I chose to create a Shiny Dashboard that integrates all of my existing charts and provides a nice structure for designing interactive web apps. Once I set up the scaffolding for how I wanted the page to look, it didn’t take too long to start filling in the boxes with different charts and scores.

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See the green line in the middle that starts up, wins a championship, and then drops off the map? That’s my grandmother.

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How popular is Donald Trump?

This question, however simple, carries long-reaching implications for America’s future. Trump’s political and moral standing come 2020 will likely define the path of the presidential election, which seems to contend either continued darkening of American politics or a great reversal of the current political environment.

As they have done for the many presidents before him, and will do for the many after him, pollsters have taken the nation’s political temperature constantly throughout the Trump administration. Luckily for us, the Huffington Post has an API which allows us to query all of these polls in aggregate and interrogate the results for specific questions.

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While I was working on my last post about NFL salary cap allocation, I struggled with how best to present the information. I knew I wanted the focus to be on outliers, but was finding a standard pie chart to be dull, and bar chart to be hard to compare. Fortunately, I stumbled upon the circumplex chart and realized this was exactly what I was looking for.

I found a number of good resources to help me on my way, most notably this post by Learning R, but ultimately ended up heavily customizing the charts until they felt right. Let’s take a look at what it takes to build and customize one of these charts!

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The Los Angeles Rams recently resigned Brandin Cooks to a 5 year, $80 million extension, a deal that locks up their deep threat to go alongside Robert Woods and Cooper Kupp. Then, just today, they turned around and handed Todd Gurley $60 million on a 4-year extension, a deal that sets a new benchmark for the running back position (and makes LeVeon Bell a happy, happy man).

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With the 2018 World Cup (and painful non-qualification) now fully in the mirror, American soccer fans have a lot to look forward to. The 2022 World Cup promises to be a great bounce bounce-back opportunity for the team, which figures to be led by a 23 year old Christian Pulisic. Four years later, the United States, Mexico, and Canada will jointly host a North American World Cup in 2026. At that time, Pulisic will be 27 and a whole new generation of American stars is expected to emerge, with other promising players such as Timothy Weah and Josh Sargent also entering their primes.

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I love the Home Run Derby. Though initially disappointed by the move to timed scoring rather than the traditional “10 outs” framework, I’ve had an amazing time watching sluggers like Aaron Judge go up against the clock in today’s bracket-style tournament. With no “monster” sluggers like Judge or Stanton in tonight’s Derby, things are a bit more wide open - I think you could make a case for a number of different players tonight.

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Baseball is a sport of inches - one half inch here and a fly out turns into a home run, one half inch there and a liner turns into a double play. Timing is also critical - striking with runners on and in scoring position is so much more valuable than a parade of solo home runs. In 2013, the St. Louis Cardinals were able to capitalize on this more than any other team in baseball history, riding a 0.330 batting average with runners in scoring position (RISP) to a 97-win season and World Series appearance.

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Chris Paul. James Harden. LeBron James. Rajon Rondo.

It’s tough deciding on who the best passers in the NBA are - everyone’s preferences are different, and there’s basically an option for everything. Love full court outlet passes? Kevin Love’s your man. Laser-like kickouts for three? John Wall is happy to show you what he’s got. With so many different aspects of the basketball becoming more science than art, it’s refreshing to watch the NBA’s best passers work their magic in their own particular ways.

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Making Sense of DC’s Public Salary Data

In the interest of transparency, most government institutions post the salary data of their employees, so that the public can have insight and visibility into where their tax dollars are going. FederalPay.org in particular is a great resource to look up the salaries of federal employees. However, this same set of tools does not typically exist for local and state governments.

In the case of the District of Columbia, the DC Department of Human Resources posts a quarterly update of public employee salary information in PDF form. While useful, this information is quite unwieldy - there are over 36,000 rows and there aren’t any easy ways to manipulate or aggregate the data beyond simple search.

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