The 29 Unopposed House seats in 2016 Election

U.S. Map of the 115th Congress

I’m somewhat new to the world of election data, but one piece of data I stumbled upon while working on the 2016 Elections for NBC News, was that 29 house seats went unopposed. I thought this was pretty interesting and wanted to understand why this happens. After half a dozen ill-informed google searches, I came up with nothing.

Logical next step (for me) was to create a static map using topojson from Atlas-Make, the final House results from the AP Election API and render all the data together using D3Node

The Data

The Map

house map

The Code

github.com/bradoyler/d3-node/examples/map-congress-unopposed.js

Lesson learned

Well, it turns out every single unopposed race was the incumbent so this was actually the most telling piece of data that sort of answered my initial question. But still, thought this map might serve someone well or even inspire someone to run for office!?!