Making a plot where the bars vary in height and width but do not bunch

Question

For the 2020 US presidential election, I am trying to make a bar plot indicating which party won the state by color of the bar, what the margin of victory was by height of the bar, and the number of electoral votes for the state won by the width of the bar. When I use geom_bar (or geom_col), some of the bars are bunched together and are off their tick marks for the respective states.

I would like to have the bars centered on the tick marks and minimal white space between the bars. I've tried various dodge settings, but nothing I've tried fixes this problem. Dividing the electoral college variable (EC) by larger numbers helps, although it's far from ideal because you lose more of the differentiation between how much each state contributes to victory.

Here is code for a reproducible example:

library(tidyverse)

## state abbreviation

st  <- c("AL", "AK", "AZ", "AR", "CA", "CO", "CT", "DE", "DC", "FL",
         "GA", "HI", "ID", "IL", "IN", "IA", "KS", "KY", "LA", "ME",
         "MD", "MA", "MI", "MN", "MS", "MO", "MT", "NE", "NV", "NH",
         "NJ", "NM", "NY", "NC", "ND", "OH", "OK", "OR", "PA", "RI",
         "SC", "SD", "TN", "TX", "UT", "VT", "VA", "WA", "WV", "WI",
         "WY")

## two-party vote share for Biden

demvs  <- c(0.371, 0.447, 0.502, 0.358, 0.649, 0.569, 0.602, 0.596,
            0.945, 0.483, 0.501, 0.65, 0.341, 0.587, 0.418, 0.458,
            0.425, 0.368, 0.405, 0.547, 0.67, 0.671, 0.514, 0.536,
            0.416, 0.422, 0.416, 0.402, 0.512, 0.537, 0.581, 0.555,
            0.617, 0.493, 0.328, 0.459, 0.331, 0.583, 0.506, 0.606,
            0.441, 0.366, 0.382, 0.472, 0.393, 0.683, 0.552, 0.599,
            0.302, 0.503, 0.275)

## party that won the state

ptywon  <- c("R", "R", "D", "R", "D", "D", "D", "D", "D", "R", "D",
             "D", "R", "D", "R", "R", "R", "R", "R", "D", "D", "D",
             "D", "D", "R", "R", "R", "R", "D", "D", "D", "D", "D",
             "R", "R", "R", "R", "D", "D", "D", "R", "R", "R", "R",
             "R", "D", "D", "D", "R", "D", "R")

## margin of victory

marg  <- c(0.258, 0.105, 0.003, 0.284, 0.298, 0.139, 0.204, 0.193,
           0.889, 0.034, 0.002, 0.301, 0.318, 0.173, 0.164, 0.084,
           0.15, 0.264, 0.189, 0.093, 0.341, 0.342, 0.028, 0.073,
           0.168, 0.157, 0.168, 0.196, 0.024, 0.075, 0.161, 0.11,
           0.234, 0.014, 0.344, 0.082, 0.339, 0.166, 0.012, 0.212,
           0.119, 0.269, 0.237, 0.057, 0.214, 0.366, 0.103, 0.199,
           0.396, 0.006, 0.45)

## number of electoral college votes for a state

EC  <- c(9, 3, 11, 6, 55, 9, 7, 3, 3, 29, 16, 4, 4, 20, 11, 6, 6, 8,
         8, 4, 10, 11, 16, 10, 6, 10, 3, 5, 6, 4, 14, 5, 29, 15, 3,
         18, 7, 7, 20, 4, 9, 3, 11, 38, 6, 3, 13, 12, 5, 10, 3)

df  <- data.frame(st,demvs,ptywon,marg)

## barplot indicating which party won the state by color, what the
## margin was, and the number of electoral votes for the state

ggplot(df, aes(x=reorder(st,-demvs),y=marg,fill=ptywon,
                      width=EC/10)) +
    geom_bar(stat="identity",position="dodge2") +
    scale_fill_manual(values=c("blue2", "red3")) +
    theme_minimal()  +
    labs(x="State",y="Margin of victory",fill="Winning party") +
    theme(axis.text.x = element_text(angle = 45, hjust = 1),
          legend.position="top")

Answer 1

Is this what you are after?

ggplot(df, aes(x=factor(tmp), width= EC/55, y=marg,fill=ptywon)) +
    geom_col() +
    scale_fill_manual(values=c("blue2", "red3")) +
    theme_minimal()  +
    labs(x="State",y="Margin of victory",fill="Winning party") +
    theme(axis.text.x = element_text(angle = 45, hjust = 1),
          legend.position="top")