The data visualization I reviewed at the start of class was that found at the following link: https://projects.fivethirtyeight.com/polls/president-general/
One thing that was immediately noticeable to me was that the approval ratings for Democrat and Republican candidates were colored appropriately (i.e. Democrats were marked blue and Republicans were marked red). In addition, independent and non-partisan candidates were distinguished as being completely separate from their Democrat and Republican colleagues (marked by a shade of yellow under the "More" option). Though this may instead serve to inadvertently indicate (and, to a certain extent, reconcile) the majoritarian nature of the United States' two-party system, the fact that it includes political independents and moderates in a distinct visual option is appreciable on its own. However, one criticism I have of this visualization is that it does not consider distinguishing independents amongst themselves, in that it is difficult to ascertain the political standing of some candidate relative to another. Furthermore, only the surnames of the candidates were included, thereby making it difficult to determine who was running against whom for the more obscure among them (for example, I thought "West" was meant to be "Ye" (birthname Kanye Omari West), a controversial right-wing rapper, when it was actually the last name of Cornel West, a prominent left-wing minister and philosopher). Lastly, the approval ratings for the candidates strangely do not add up to 100%. Though this is ordinarily explained by some pollees not approving of any particular candidate or party member, this is never made explicit in the visualization. Regardless of my personal criticisms, however, I believe that it does the bare minimum of neatly demonstrating approval ratings of the most prominent and popular candidates, namely those who have the greatest chance of stealing the election. In conjunction, the decision to correlate saturation with approval percentage was a nice touch, although it was barely noticeable.