Politico reduced 2,500 disaster declarations to 45 data points, slapped a partisan label on them, and called it journalism.
Sometimes this work is done quickly. Someone will show a chart, point to the source data, and I’ll grab the data, and it turns out that the chart is just a simple graphical representation of the source data. For people who care about the truth, this is the ideal scenario, but it is also boring. I want some really outrageous narrative driven by a chart, but it’s hard to figure out where the data came from. That’s where the real fun is.
I got that this weekend in this chart, which came to my attention through Jeremiah Johnson. The chart tells the story of a vindictive, cartoonishly evil president who is making the victims of disasters suffer because they live in the wrong state.
This chart comes from a Politico article with the title “It’s 3 times harder for blue states to get disaster funding under Trump.” The key data point in this article is in the chart above.
The president has approved just 23 percent of blue state requests for disaster aid, compared to 89 percent for red states.
There are no Blue States, only Red States with Blue cities.