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Latest comment: 1 year ago3 comments2 people in discussion
I know this is highly speculative, but due to how many state legislatures are nearly evenly divided after the 2022 elections, there is a higher probability than usual that one of these chambers could flip control due to a special election. Because there are so few chambers up for election in off-years, the maps for the 2021 elections colored in grey the states that held special elections that year. If a chamber were to flip (or become evenly-divided) due to a special election, would we color it as such, or would we still color it grey like all the other states that are only holding special elections? OutlawRun (talk) 02:57, 20 November 2022 (UTC)Reply
The bigger question is what do we do in the very likely event that the New Hampshire House of Representatives becomes a tie after the special election this November. We could color it dark purple, but then every resignation would result in changing the color and it would become crazy. There's unlikely to be a new speaker election based on what I've read, so we could just keep it gray, but that might be the case even if Democrats somehow pull of a mid-session flip. Politicdude (talk) 14:42, 14 October 2023 (UTC)Reply
My gut instinct is to count seats that are left vacant due to resignations as of their original party until a special election flips them, but I don't want to color New Hampshire until after the November specials. I would personally want to count New Hampshire as "split body formed" if that's how things end up after the special elections, even if more seats become vacant, but I can understand not wanting to change the overall control designation unless the chamber reorganizes around it. If a lot of secondary sources report it as being tied, I think we should definitely reflect that.
This does lead me to another question, which is whether or not we need separate colors for split body formed/maintained. It is very rare for a split body to remain split after more than one cycle. To my knowledge, this last happened in 2000 if you don't count the Alaska Senate, which was controlled by a coalition until 2012. My main worry with the split body colors is that they are very similar to the coalition colors, and I don't want the maps to be overly confusing. OutlawRun (talk) 16:06, 15 October 2023 (UTC)Reply
