Supreme Court Confirmations

Introduction

Following up on Rachel Wellford’s tweet about Senate votes for Supreme Court confirmations, I decided to try to graph the data. Below, I have

• a ggplot picture with decent labeling
• a searchable datatable
• a plotly interactive graph

The data came from Senate.gov. I chose to focus on 1967 onward because it appeared that voting procedures were slightly different before Thurgood Marshall’s nomination process. Otherwise, I would have chosen to go back to when the Senate first had 100 members.

library("DT")
library("ggplot2")
library("ggrepel")
library("plotly")
library("readxl")
scc <- read_excel("Supreme Court confirmations.xlsx")

ggplot

ggplot(scc, aes(x = Nay, y = Yea, label = Last)) +
  geom_point(aes(color = President, size = Nay)) +
  geom_text_repel() +
  labs(x = "Nay votes", y = "Yea votes", 
       title = "Supreme Court Confirmations (1967 to present)",
       subtitle = "Marshall to Kavanaugh",
       caption = "Source: Senate.gov") + 
  xlim(c(-10, 60)) +
  ylim(c(40, 110))

Datatable

DT::datatable(scc)

Plotly

Here is a slightly interactive graph built with a combination of ggplot and plotly:

basemap <- ggplot(scc, aes(x = Nay, y = Yea, label = Last)) +
  geom_point() +
  geom_text(nudge_x = 5) + # geom_text_repel is not supported by Plotly yet
  labs(x = "Nay votes", y = "Yea votes", 
       title = "Supreme Court Confirmations (1967 to present)",
       subtitle = "Marshall to Kavanaugh",
       caption = "Source: Senate.gov") + 
  xlim(c(-10, 60)) +
  ylim(c(40, 110))
ggplotly(basemap)

Here is a slightly interactive graph with readable labels:

t <- list(
  family = "sans serif",
  size = 14,
  color = toRGB("grey80"))

plot_ly(scc, x = ~Nay, y = ~Yea, text = ~Nominee) %>%
  add_markers() %>%
  add_text(textfont = t, textposition = "top right")

Finally, here is a fully interactive graph, but the labels are not revealed until someone hovers their mouse cursor over the points:

plot_ly(scc, x = ~Nay, y = ~Yea, type = 'scatter', mode = 'markers',
        hoverinfo = 'text',
        text = ~paste('<b>Nominee:</b> ', Nominee,
                      '<br> Yea: ', Yea,
                      '<br> Nay: ', Nay,
                      '<br> Nominated: ', Nominated,
                      '<br> Confirmed: ', Confirmed,
                      '<br> President: ', President))