Infographic Demonstrates Colorado as a Political Swing State in 2012 Election Season

Challenge

As the 2012 U.S. presidential election approached, GroundFloor Media (GFM) saw an opportunity to visually illustrate the critical positioning of Colorado as a swing state with a unique infographic. With nine electoral votes, Colorado became incredibly competitive for both President Obama and Mitt Romney, given that the state had both a reliable GOP population, as well as an influx of young professionals, Hispanic voters and females in the Denver suburbs that were transitioning the state more blue.

As such, both candidates visited Colorado multiple times and poured millions of funding into advertisements that flooded our TV stations, radio ads and mail.

To harness this opportunity and show Colorado’s political anatomy, GFM created an infographic that visually presented key data showing our home state was becoming a divided and highly sought-after battleground in the 2012 presidential election.

Solution

After spending considerable time researching and compiling relevant data through Colorado’s Secretary of State and other reliable sources, GFM worked with one of its information designers to create an interesting and engaging infographic sharing the anatomy of Colorado as a political swing state. Data included the number of visits by each candidate to Colorado, money spent on campaign ads in the state, the number of registered voters by party and the number of Coloradans who voted early in the 2012 election.

Results

The “Colorado: Anatomy of a Swing State” infographic was released on the GFM blog on the eve of election day and was picked up by a variety of outlets, including the Denver Egotist, the DenverPRBlog and Westword.

In addition, the infographic resulted in the biggest single day of traffic to the GFM blog in 2012.