New electoral vote calculator

[True Federalist (진정한 연방 주의자)]

Generally a much appreciated improvement, but I do have eight minor critiques.

First, unless my memory is playing tricks on me, the old generator at one time allowed for years earlier than 1840. (Tho that may have been removed from the old generator at the same time as when manually setting the year to a future date allowed one to include Puerto Rico on the map, and in any case is not available in the currently available old generator.)
Second, the map generator is unable to display State EVs when you set them greater than 99 manually, tho it will incorporate altered EV numbers in the EV bar at top.
Third, and this is no doubt is related to the changes made to add the EV bar, but the old generator allowed one to have text instead of a number as the EV. That was occasionally useful when one wanted to put a label on parts of a map rather than State EVs.  The adjusting EV bar is a more useful feature tho, so definitely don't scrap it.
Fourth, unlike the old generator, the EVs for antebellum Virginia are shown centered in postbellum Virginia, which makes it look off-center in pre-1864 maps.
Fifth, the labels for MA and MD on the legend boxes at the right of the map sometimes disappear depending upon how much the page is zoomed. (A similar problem afflicts the "Yellow" color choice in the drop-down selector for party choice in the scenario generator.)
Fifth, you're specifying percentiles rather than perdeciles like the old generator did, but as far as I can tell, you're still shading by decile rather than centile. (Tho at least you are gracefully handling values below 20% now.) Perhaps centile shading is intended for a future version?
Sixth, it would be nice if the hatched area only covered areas that were territories in that year. Bonus points if territorial boundaries also showed.
Seventh, a nice added feature for antebellum South Carolina, and 1876 Colorado would be to show that there was no PV in that State.
Eighth, from a standard GUI POV, it is not intuitive that in the scenario generator, to have no incumbent be selected, you click on the current incumbent radio button. I get that you were probably trying to avoid adding an explicit "No incumbent" choice, and it wasn't difficult to figure out, but you may want to reconsider.

[True Federalist (진정한 연방 주의자)]

I can't reproduce any missing labels due to zoom.

It probably depends upon the fonts a browser uses. If it helps, MA and MD are the widest text labels.  Also, the problem is showing up for me only when the map is shrunk due to zoom, not expanded due to zoom.


By the way, I came across some quirks involving negative or decimal EVs. (Yes, I was deliberately trying weird inputs to test what would break.)

• Decimals don't display, but the integer part is included in the EV bar
• -0 is just 0, so it's clear you're not using IEEE floating point
• -1 gives the default values for the 2020 map, regardless of what year the map actually is.
• -2 to -9 show up on the map, but are treated as 0 for the EV bar
• -10 and below don't show on the map and are treated as 0 for the EV bar

So it looks like there currently is a kludge for Jim's desire to have nothing showup in certain States.

I don't want to have the 0's appear,

[True Federalist (진정한 연방 주의자)]

You have some errors in the values for some seceded States in 1864 and 1868.  Based on the apportionment done from the 1860 Census data,

Mississippi should have 7 EV instead of 8 EV.
Texas should have 6 EV instead of 8 EV.
East Virginia should have 10 EV instead of 11 EV. (Without splitting, United Virginia would have had 13 EVs. 3 of Virginia's 11 Representatives were assigned to West Virginia upon the latter's admission.)

[True Federalist (진정한 연방 주의자)]

The format is:

Code:

"stateID":[electoral_votes, winningPartyID, popular_vote_shade, "status_string", "tooltip_text"]

winningPartyID is based on the candidates:{} entries. 99 is a static ID used for tossup status. Status string can be 'seceded' or 'territory' or 'removed' for now.

Once I finish working on jimrtex's request, there will be 6th array entry at the end for EV label text.

It would be nice if instead of just "r", "b", "g", "y", "p", "gr", and a possible future addition of "o" for orange as some have requested, if there were some method add custom colors for popular_vote_shade.

I know it would likely be a good bit of coding to implement, and details on how to do it would obviously depend upon how the backend handles generating the various intensities of the color shades for particular percentile values. (Based on my experiments, I'm guessing a switch or nested-if structure is currently used to pick from a table of intensities for each decile.) So obviously, if you decide this is even worth considering, any changes you might make to allow for finer gradations of shades as some have requested needs to be done first.

[True Federalist (진정한 연방 주의자)]

I am interested to see the calculator for 2024, which could be coming soon(?)

My impression is that the number of swing states is shrinking every election cycle.

Is it possible (except for the electoral college numbers) the map for 2024 will be identical to the 2020 map?

That depends upon what happens with the Douglas Commonwealth and Puerto Rico Statehood proposals. Puerto Rico is the likelier to get bipartisan support, but other than maybe getting the necessary shape file, adding additional States for future years should be fairly easy.

[True Federalist (진정한 연방 주의자)]

Notice something wrong with NE and ME?

It's fixable, either by deleting the CD entries as I did for NE, or adjusting the EV numbers as I did for ME, tho it'd have been simpler to just adjust Maine-at-large to 2 and leave the CDs at 1, tho at-large at 0 and the CDs at 2 works also, since either way the total is 4, tho the two methods affect the EV bar differently unless the same party wins the at-large and all CDs for a State.

[True Federalist (진정한 연방 주의자)]

Absolutely LOVE this.

When this site was first started the red Republican blue Democrat was starting to solidify itself but not to the degree it is now. Now you see the marketing and social media accounts of both parties are identified with there colors.

It’s time the state avatars line up with it.

Absolutely not.  The traditional Atlas choices of Red=Democrat and Blue=Republican should remain those used for avatars and the default color choices for maps. Tho, the ability to choose colors other than the defaults for maps is much appreciated.

[True Federalist (진정한 연방 주의자)]

I really don't like this updated design at all. It just doesn't work with the Atlas colors. I feel like the modteam or whomever is making these changes should poll the userbase before making "improvements." The same thing happened when the name and board icons of the site were changed, and when the recommend button was added.

I agree. It seems odd that such major changes are suddenly made permanent without any prior consultation.

I did poll the community on recommendations before. It was split. So I eventually went with it. It's a very common forum feature these days, so I don't really get the big deal.

Dave also just released features and took some minor feedback afterwards. I'm unsure why the expectation is changing for things I'm doing. I've also polled the community on other minor changes before, and what I learned was that the vast majority of people here didn't give a crap, so I stopped doing it.

I didn't change the base color designations for the parties, I simply allowed people to fully customize the candidates/parties/colors. As you can see, the colors start the same as Dave's - red for Democrats, blue for Republicans.

If you don't like the shades, you can use the old calculator.

I know some people think it’s an overdue change, but I think it’s a shame that this new EVC seems to be causing the increasing abandonment of the distinctive Atlas colours for the mainstream media ones.

If people don't want to do the old colors, then they aren't going to do it. One reason I started working on this in the first place was that I was noticing more and more people using other map generators and just posting images of their maps. This isn't like the 2000s or early 2010s. There are many options available for this now. I'm not going to purposefully hold things back just to enforce an alternate color scheme. I don't blame people, either. The previous map calculator produces maps that just look very 1990s. I mean, this entire forum is literally using code and a theme designed in the early 2000s. Like it or not, things have to change eventually. At a certain point, it requires more work to keep them the same than it does to evolve and adapt.

At any rate, if people don't like this, I expect them to not use it. I never expected everyone to like it. I know better than that. This forum and the world in general is full of people who like specific things, and that's that, come hell or high water.

How

Go to the Atlas site and follow the links from there.

[True Federalist (진정한 연방 주의자)]

Also, if Virginia's feeling especially ambitious one day maybe the former Confederate flags can be re-added for older elections. I have plenty of time to kill, so I could research the flags and resize them myself.

How many different versions of state flags are there? I wonder if it's practical to try and have it display the right flags depending on the map year.

I would have to research that, but I do know that Georgia, for example, only had its current flag since 2003. Prior to that, it featured the stars and bars like Mississippi's did. And obviously it would've had a completely different flag prior to 1860.

If it even had a flag. It wasn't until the Civil War and Reconstruction that State flags became customary. The reason why many State flags are State seals on bedsheets is that regimental flags in the Civil War era typically had that design combined with the name of the regiment.  Georgia didn't officially adopt a State flag until 1879.

[True Federalist (진정한 연방 주의자)]

How would yalls recommend making the new EC votes available?

I was thinking of a "2020 (post-census)" option that shows the 2020 results with the new numbers. I could then phase that menu option out once the 2024 presidential election concludes.

Any thoughts?

yalls?  "Y'all" is already plural.

[True Federalist (진정한 연방 주의자)]

The only way 20% would even be possible would be in a at least a four-way contest, and we've never really had one at the presidential level in a general election. 1860 came closest, but that was a bunch of two- or three-way contests in various States.