Approval Ratings of US Senators

Quick political disclaimer - I think Bernie Sanders should be the next US President, even though I don't get a vote....

I recently came across this article on Morning Consult showing the results of a recent poll that placed Bernie Sanders as the US Senator with highest within State approval rating. I wanted to skim the results of the survey, but unfortunately they were presented in a pretty boring way that made it hard to quickly navigate and explore. I thought I could probably do a better job.

And so I came up with this

Now the hex-bin map is something I've been wanting to try, and thanks to both Matt Chambers and Brittany Fong for their recent instructional blog posts on how to do this. I wanted to use Matt's technique, and he kindly provides some clear instructions and base data to copy. Definitely read his post to understand what I'm doing below.

But because there are two senators per state, I needed to split up the hexagons. To do this I created both a left and a right half-hexagon, using powerpoint as my tool, and placed each in the Tableau Shape File repository. I was going to re-color the shapes in Tableau anyway so don't worry about the shades below.

And I needed to adjust the positioning of each half of the state, so I nudged one half left and one half right a bit.

See how my column field includes values 0.25 away from the centre of where the hex's will be placed?

Lastly, I wanted to use Net Promoter Score because I didn't think the straight approval rating tells the whole story. And as you know I can't resist throwing in a URL picture.

Feedback welcome, and feel free to use this technique for any Senate related vizzes in future!