Recreating gradient colored lines in R with ggforce's geom_link function (CC328)

Pat recreates a gradient colored barbell plot made by Nate Silver in R with the help of the ggplot2, ggforce, ggtext, and glue packages. The "handle" of this dumbbell plot was made into a gradient of colors using the geom_link function from the ggforce package. Along the way he also uses the annotate, geom_point, geom_textbox, scale_x_continuous, scale_y_continuous, coord_cartesian, scale_color_gradient, scale_fill_manual, labs, theme_manual, and theme functions. You can find the code he developed in this episode at https://www.riffomonas.org/code_club/2024-12-30-polling-gradient. Nate Silver's newsletter can be found at https://www.natesilver.net/p/hopium-comes-at-a-high-price. Pat's newsletter describing how he would go about generating the figure can be found at https://shop.riffomonas.org/posts/visualizing-bias-in-polling-data-with-a-dumbbell-plot.

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If you want to cite this video, please consider citing https://journals.asm.org/doi/10.1128/mra.01310-22

0:00 Introduction
6:24 Creating major components of figure
21:53 Creating a gradient colored dumbbell
30:11 Adding (and hiding) vertical line at zero
37:21 Cleaning up appearance of titles and labels
42:41 Adding legend to top of figure