NinetyDegreeZ

County Flip Maps for presidential election pages

Hello. I appreciate what you are trying to do in adding maps to show all the county flips in presidential elections, but I think that this is unnecessary. Unlike with legislative elections, "flipping" counties has no direct impact on electoral results, so having an entire map dedicated to them in the infobox is frivolous. The information is still useful in the "results" section, but we don't need an entire map for it. We use flip maps for legislative elections because it allows readers to easily visualize which seats parties gained or lost in that election. Each seat is a spot in a legislative body, so the individual victories are significant. With county maps, however, land doesn't vote. How many counties a candidate wins has nothing to do with whether or not they actually won, so I believe that putting this information in the infobox is an unnecessary use of space. The information is still good to have, which is why we have a subsection for it in the "results" section near the bottom of the page (thank you for expanding those to past elections, by the way). If you really thing that a page needs a county flip map, you could put it there, but if only one or two counties flipped, I don't think that any map is necessary. In any case, however, it is not necessary for these maps to go in the infobox. Thank you for understanding. OutlawRun (talk) 23:25, 27 March 2023 (UTC)

Hi, thank you for the feedback. I was aware of most of this already and I don't particularly care how useful the map is, I realized it's a better representation than the lists of flipped counties that are already in the results section, since many viewers don't know the locations of those counties, so these maps are intended to possibly be a replacement for them. I will move all of the maps to the results section as soon as I have the time. NinetyDegreeZ (talk) 23:35, 27 March 2023 (UTC)

I also think that the "largest city" thing in the results section list is kind of irrelevant as well, since that changes over time and can become outdated. If we don't want to remove it, changing it to county seat would be better since that changes very rarely. NinetyDegreeZ (talk) 23:40, 27 March 2023 (UTC)

I think the "largest city" part can be relevant if people don't recognize the county name but do recognize the city. For example, a lot of people don't know where Bexar County, Texas is, but the would recognize the name San Antonio. OutlawRun (talk) 23:44, 27 March 2023 (UTC)

Well, guess what, San Antonio is Bexar County's seat, and most recognizable major cities are also county seats, so changing that for future lists would have the same effect while also being more consistent. IIRC New York 2008 might already have county seats instead of largest cities. NinetyDegreeZ (talk) 00:16, 28 March 2023 (UTC)

Anyway, I moved 7 out of 33 maps to the results section tonight, I'll move the rest in the morning (Eastern United States) unless you or anyone else wants to do it instead. NinetyDegreeZ (talk) 00:48, 28 March 2023 (UTC)

If I'm being honest, though, I think a "county swing" map is more generally useful than a "county flip" map. Someone added them to most of the 2022 Senate and governor elections, and I think if you replaced the flip maps with maps like those, it would add more to the page. That way, the map shows swing information for the entire state, rather than just for the counties that "flipped," especially since a county "flipping" technically doesn't mean anything on its own. If you were to keep the "flip" maps, I would have a switcher with the "swing" maps as the default (I don't understand the one guy's obsession with not using switchers on presidential election infoboxes). The captions also probably don't need to specify the party the gain is from. Most legislative map captions don't even do that, and with how small the maps are, it makes the captions take up a lot of lines. OutlawRun (talk) 04:47, 28 March 2023 (UTC)

Yeah but those require more effort. I might even be able to combine them somehow into one map (have hold/flip as an outline on the county, but that won't work because of Virginia's independent cities so never mind) I could probably make them but it would take too much time. I did see that Minnesota 2020 had one already and I could probably make them based on that and add my flips map to that one's switcher. In the meantime I'm just going to make flip maps and do swing maps later. NinetyDegreeZ (talk) 11:26, 28 March 2023 (UTC)

Hey, I know it's been a while since we first talked about this, but I forgot to mention that I don't think your captions need the "from Republican" or "from Democratic" parts of the gain colors. They should just say "gain." We don't have different colors for flipping from different parties, which your captions would imply that we do. It also unnecessarily drags the label onto a second row, which I think looks bad. I know from other messages you are reluctant to make mass changes to edits you have already made, but I would like to at least make this suggestion for your future edits. OutlawRun (talk) 22:51, 9 December 2023 (UTC)

Capitalization

Hello, and thanks for your additions to the presidential election articles, but could you please consider not capitalizing words unnecessarily, like in "Swing by County" and "County Flips". Here at Wikipedia, we only capitalize proper nouns. Please see WP:Capitalization, the very first sentence: "Wikipedia avoids unnecessary capitalization."

Thank you.

HandsomeFella (talk) 06:19, 12 September 2023 (UTC)

I'm not going to go back and fix that on every single page I edited unless I have something else to add to the page, but others are welcome to do so. NinetyDegreeZ (talk) 11:09, 12 September 2023 (UTC)

Thank you for going back and fixing the issue. I would have done it eventually, but I just didn't get aroung to doing it today, so you beat me to it.

HandsomeFella (talk) 19:14, 13 September 2023 (UTC)

I haven't done it to every page yet but I've been doing it as I make and add trend maps and I will keep doing that until I get through every state (and I've just been fixing capitalization for the ones where I'm not making trend maps because the state swung by less than 1.25%) NinetyDegreeZ (talk) 20:18, 13 September 2023 (UTC)

OK. I will go through them later. Thanks all the same. HandsomeFella (talk) 21:09, 13 September 2023 (UTC)

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