An Extremely Scientific Analysis of DC Campaign Color Palettes
No, really. There are graphs and everything.
With a 24-way race for the DC Council’s two open at-large seats, it seems like every lamp post has sprouted campaign posters, and lawn signs have popped up like mushrooms after a summer storm.
Hopefully you’re casting well-informed votes — but maybe you’re a single-issue voter whose single issue is graphic design.
If that’s the case, you’ve still got a surprisingly broad field to pick from. Drawing inspiration from The Pudding’s wonderful analysis of candidate diversity and campaign colors, we took a closer look at the candidates for DC’s two big local races — and what their color schemes say about them.
What are we looking at here?
This analysis covers 50 candidates for DC Council and the State Board of Education (SBOE). That means
- Twenty-three candidates for the Council’s at-large seats
- Ten candidates for ward-specific seats on the Council: four in Ward 2, two in Ward 4, and four in Ward 8
- Six candidates for the SBOE at-large seat
- Eleven candidates for ward-specific seat on the SBOE: four in Ward 2, one in Ward 4, three in Ward 7, and three in Ward 8
The field includes 35 men and 15 women, and the candidates for the DC Council positions include 24 independents, four Democrats, two Statehood Green Party candidates, two Republicans, and one Libertarian. (SBOE is a non-partisan position.) And if you’re a fellow nerd who is interested in where all this data came from, those details are at the end of the article.
The colors of Council campaigns
Blue is easily the most popular color in DC campaigns, followed by red. That said, purple and yellow both make a decent showing as well; all in all, two-thirds of candidates used a non-traditional color scheme, meaning they used red or blue in addition to a more adventurous color. And nine candidates (18% of the total) didn’t use red or blue at all.
Beyond color, we also counted up the stars and stripes on candidates’ logos and signs. Thirty candidates — 60% — use some variation on the three stars on the DC flag, and half of those also include the two stripes (sadly, none were brave enough to make use of the Eggs n Bacon flag).
You view the above graphic on Tableau, where you can filter it and see how the data breaks down by Council vs. SBOE, gender, and ward.
How does DC stack up to the presidential race?
For this, let’s look just at candidates for Council, an ostensibly partisan seat — though of course, almost all of the candidates running in DC are doing so as independents. Blue and red tied for first place here, but that doesn’t mean that candidates use exclusively those colors. Marya Pickering (the Republican at-large candidate) is the only one to have a red-and-blue scheme, and her yard signs even skip the blue in favor of a DC-centric red and white design (though “design” is a strong word here, they look like they were done in Word). Sixty-one percent used a non-traditional color palette, compared to 41% of presidential candidates (per The Pudding).
One possible reason for the difference: DC politics don’t approach party affiliation in the same way national races do. Again, we’re looking at 24 independent candidates here. Party affiliation doesn’t tie a candidate to tradition, though. Two of the four Democrats went with purple, Brooke Pinto threw in some pink, and Trayon White joined the Statehood Green Party in incorporating, well, green.
Another possibility? DC’s men are a little more adventurous with their color schemes. Just 30% of male presidential candidates in 2020 used non-traditional color schemes, compared to 58% of male DC council candidates. The difference was smaller for women: 67% in DC Council races, and 62% nationwide.
Perhaps the most likely reason for DC’s more adventurous design, though, is that local candidates don’t need to have the broad appeal that national candidates do. That holds up as you dig down to the ward level. Just under half of DC’s at-large candidates used non-traditional color palettes, compared to a whopping 90% of candidates for a ward seat. Of those, one third (30% of all candidates for a ward seat) used neither red nor blue. Only two at-large candidates, Alex Padro and Joe Bishop-Henchman, were brave enough to forego red and blue in that race. The more localized the race, the more our candidates seem willing to throw caution to the wind to get your attention.
State Board of Education: The wild west of DC design
The nonpartisan SBOE race is where things really get interesting. More candidates used neither red nor blue (24%) than used both colors (12%). While blue was still the color of choice for SBOE candidates, red dropped to third place, below yellow and tied with purple.
Surprisingly, SBOE candidates also forgo DC-specific imagery. A far smaller portion use three stars in their logos or signs: 41% compared to 72% of the Council candidates. Only Ravi Perry uses both stars and stripes. (He also throws in DC’s distinctive outline for good measure).
Since we don’t have national data to compare to, it’s hard to say if this is unique to DC, if it’s tied to the nonpartisan role, or if school board candidates are just more creative. Another possibility is that in a city where less than one in five residents has a kid under 18, voters might not be as invested in education issues the way they are in DC Council issues. If candidates can’t count on swaying voters with their policy views, maybe a snazzy poster will do the trick.
Want to explore more?
You can see a breakdown of all the candidates’ campaign colors, including hex codes, in this spreadsheet. If you dig through the data and find something else interesting, please share!
Methodology notes: Where did these colors come from?
I used the ColorZilla Chrome extension to obtain the hexadecimal codes for all colors analyzed here. Wherever possible, I sampled colors from candidates’ websites or social media posts. Some have very clearly branded campaigns with obvious color schemes; others use graphic design a bit more… haphazardly. In those cases, I did my best to pull the dominant color(s) from logos, website layouts, or other designed materials. All photos above also came from candidates’ websites or social media.
There are a few candidates whose branding is rather unclear. Charles Boston was excluded from the analysis because I could find neither an up-to-date website for him nor any signs. Vincent Gray was similarly excluded because he doesn’t seem to be actively campaigning for his uncontested seat, and Ann Wilcox doesn’t have any signs or branding independent of the Statehood Green Party website. I’m not sure if the sites of Nate Derenge and Dorothy Douglas actually have color schemes — or are just using the default color options for their WordPress themes — but I counted them anyway. I also included the photo in Kathy Henderson’s sign as part of the design, given the size and prominence. Finally, I used a photo of Alex Padro’s campaign sign, which I suspect has received far more views than his far-more boring website.
Once I had all of my hex codes, I hand-coded them into categories (the academic way of saying “I looked at them and decided what color they are”). This does leave some room for human error, as I’m just one human who has normal human eyes and a good but not excellent laptop. Not to mention that a number of these colors are on the border between one shade and the next. Some examples that you’re welcome to fight me on:
- Brooke Pinto, Allistair Chang, and Janeese Lewis George: blue or purple? (I went with blue, blue, and purple, respectively, though I’m still not sure that was the right choice for Pinto’s.)
- Do Ed Lazere and Franklin Garcia have red-and-blue color schemes, or red-and-gray? (I settled on blue in both cases — though you could also argue with me that Lazere uses dark orange, not red.)
- Jeanné Lewis uses a color best called salmon or coral, but does that count as orange or pink? (I decided on orange.)
- Is teal (James Harnett) a shade of blue or of green? (I’m still not certain that it’s green, but it’s definitely not blue.)
Unlike The Pudding, I decided to ignore the “white” part of “red, white, and blue.” In local races, budgets are smaller and designs are less polished, so it’s almost impossible to tell who is using white as an intentional design choice and who just printed their signs on white because it was cheaper that way (Marya Pickering, cough cough).
Finally, a note on demographics: Unlike with presidential candidates, we don’t know for sure how local candidates identify. I based the above analysis on how the candidates present, and sincerely apologize if I have misgendered anyone. For (hopefully) obvious reasons, I decided against trying to determine candidates’ race/ethnicity, sexual orientation, or other demographics.
I see your ~true colors~
What does this all say about our candidates? Maybe that they’re more creative than the norm… or maybe nothing at all, because non-traditional colors don’t mean that a candidate’s visual identity is particularly unique. Take, for example, Chander Jayamaran’s campaign signs. Despite being purple and red, they don’t jump out at you from a crowded field — particularly since a number of candidates are using those same colors. (It’s a good thing that Ravi Perry and Robert White are running for different positions.) Or Vincent Orange, whose signs are only memorable because his last name is literally a color.
On the opposite end of the spectrum are campaigns like that of Randy Downs. While it’s coded here as “traditional,” the lighter shade of blue gives his campaign more energy than, say, Marcus Goodwin’s. (Why not treat light blue as its own color, just like light red, aka pink? Mostly because we as a society don’t treat that as its own color for some reason, and I’m not going to fight that here. One of the 730DC editors has already disagreed with my views on teal, so determining what counts as light blue is something I’ll leave for another researcher.)
It turns out that at the end of the day, there’s more to good campaign signage than a nice color palette, just like there’s more to good politics than campaign signage. Who’d have thought?
