US Sympathies Over Time

A replication of Gallup’s analysis of American sympathy toward Israelis vs. Palestinians, from 2000 through 2025. This project reads the original Gallup CSV data, computes the sympathy difference (Israelis − Palestinians), and produces a line‐chart styled after Gallup’s own visualization.

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🗂 Project Structure

USsentiments/
├── data/
│   ├── Americans Sympathies.csv
│   ├── Democrats Sympathies.csv
│   └── Republicans Sympathies.csv
├── images/
│   └── israelis-palestinians.png   ← generated plot
├── plot_sympathies.R               ← main R script
└── README.md

• data/ Raw CSV exports from Gallup for each group (All Americans, Democrats, Republicans).

• images/ Output folder containing the final plot image.

• plot_sympathies.R R script that reads, cleans, and plots the Gallup data using tidyverse, showtext, and ggtext.

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📷 Preview

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🚀 Getting Started

1. Clone the Repo

git clone https://github.com/joseph-data/USsentiments.git
cd USsentiments

2. Install Dependencies

Run in R or RStudio:

install.packages(c("tidyverse", "showtext", "ggtext"))

3. Execute the Script

Rscript plot_sympathies.R

This will:

1. Read all *Sympathies.csv files in data/.
2. Compute the yearly sympathy difference (Israelis − Palestinians).
3. Generate and save the plot to images/israelis-palestinians.png (6×6.97″ at 300 dpi).

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📝 Walkthrough of plot_sympathies.R

Below is a high-level rundown of the main sections in the script.

# 1. Setup -------------------------------------------------------------------
library(tidyverse)    # data wrangling & ggplot2
library(showtext)     # custom Google fonts
library(ggtext)       # rich text in ggplot2

# 2. Font Configuration -----------------------------------------------------
font_add_google("Libre Franklin", "franklin")
showtext_opts(dpi = 300)
showtext_auto()

• Purpose: Load required packages and register the Libre Franklin font for high‑res output.

# 3. Data Ingestion & Cleaning ----------------------------------------------
csv_files <- list.files("data", pattern = "Sympathies.*\\.csv$", full.names = TRUE)
gallup_data <- read_csv(csv_files, id = "party", skip = 1,
                        col_names = c("year", "israelis", "palestinians")) %>%
  mutate(
    party       = str_replace(party, "' Sympathies.*", ""),
    party       = if_else(party == "Americans", "All\nAmericans", party),
    israelis    = parse_number(israelis),
    palestinians= parse_number(palestinians),
    difference  = israelis - palestinians,
    date        = as.Date(paste0(year, "-01-01"))
  ) %>%
  select(party, date, difference)

• Purpose: Read all three CSVs, clean labels, parse percentages, compute the difference, and prepare a date column for plotting.

# 4. Plot Construction ------------------------------------------------------
gallup_plot <- gallup_data %>%
  ggplot(aes(x = date, y = difference, color = party)) +
  geom_line(size = 1) +
  # ... (annotations, text labels, reference lines) ...
  scale_color_manual(values = c(
    Republicans    = "#BC2B24",
    `All\nAmericans` = "#494949",
    Democrats      = "#1366B3"
  )) +
  theme_minimal(base_family = "franklin")

• Purpose: Build the time‑series line chart with custom annotations, quadrant labels, and Gallup‑style theming.

# 5. Save Output ------------------------------------------------------------
ggsave(
  filename = "images/israelis-palestinians.png",
  plot     = gallup_plot,
  width    = 6,
  height   = 6.97,
  dpi      = 300
)

• Purpose: Export the final visualization as a high‑resolution PNG ready for publication or embedding.

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ℹ️ Credits

• Source data: Gallup poll, March 2025
• Original article: Less than half sympathetic toward Israelis